Rose declared herself to be too excited to eat, but Terrington insisted on her finishing what he thought sufficient, and set her an example in appetite in spite of numerous interruptions.
No one could say, he reminded her, where nor of what their next meal might be.
Then he found her a place from which she could see, as she insisted, the progress of the fight in the greatest safety, posted her doolie with its bearers behind, and left the faithful Gholam in charge of her.
"I mayn't see you again," he said, taking her hand, "but word will be sent to him, and you must do as he tells you, as we may have to make a dash to get over to the Gul."
"And if we're beaten will we go back?" she asked.
He shook his head.
"If we're beaten we shall die here," he said quietly.
She held out her other hand to him.
"I'm not afraid now," she said under her breath.
An hour of anxious waiting followed, then the enemy's scouts began to appear on the road in the gap of the ridge that Dore was holding.
As the ridge offered them no advantages and the searching of it entailed exposure, they kept to the lower ground and came on slowly on either side of the road. An advance-guard followed, and then a body of horsemen, the valley growing slowly brown with them.
They halted with evident suspicion of Terrington's tactics, but came on again, reassured by the safety of the scouts, who were within a few yards of the lower sangars, before, following the signal stammer of the Maxim from the road, fire opened from the whole line at once upon the packed mass in the valley.
The result should have been disastrous to the attackers had the shooting been even fairly accurate, which unfortunately it was not. The Dogras included a very small proportion of marksmen, and the Bakót men had not outlived their remembrance of the matchlock, and probably fired over the heads of everything. Some score of the scouts were turned over, and a few men and horses fell in the main body, chiefly to the Maxim. The remainder scampered for cover in all directions, followed by an independent fusillade which did very little harm. At the sound of the firing, reinforcements began to pour through the gap above which the Sikhs lay, silent but excited spectators, and in a very short time the attack was more cautiously renewed.
The high ground which Terrington was holding on either wing converged forward from his centre, so that the Saris in trying to force the road found themselves exposed to a crescent of fire, and after a vain attempt to rush the Maxim, fell back, and by creeping up the sides of the valley began a movement to outflank him from above.
For this they only needed time to be successful, as the defenders' line was already stretched beyond the limits of safety, and Terrington watched with varying anxiety the progress of this movement, the gathering mass of the enemy on the road beneath him, and the slow closing up of the Guides in his rear.
He gained some time by a sortie from either flank, cutting off the men who were climbing above him, but this only forced them to make a wider circuit and postponed their eventual success. He returned from this sally, a smoking carbine in his hand, his face smeared with heat and dust, and a bullet-hole through his helmet, to find Rose standing in the sangar which he had quitted, watching him with proud admiration.
The enemy's centre was following the sortie back with every rifle that could bear upon it, and bullets were striking in front of the sangar and flying over it like brazen winged bees. Two or three men had been hit, and Terrington stooped to lift one of them into safety before he could speak to Rose.
"Go back!" he said almost angrily. "What are you doing here?"
"I shan't!" she returned defiantly. "I'm going to be with you."
Terrington turned to direct the carrying of the wounded down to the road: then he put his hand upon her shoulder and said quietly.
"Go back, please, for my sake, to the doolie, we're all going forward in a few minutes."
Gholam, who had been standing beside her, with an expression, turned towards Terrington, of absolute impotence, gave a little jump and clapped his hand to his elbow.
"Are you hit?" said Terrington.
The man withdrew his hand, looked at it, all smeared with blood, and salaamed.
"The Sahib's servant has the honour," he replied gravely.
Terrington placed himself more completely between Rose and the enemy's fire.
"Take him down, dear, will you, and tie him up?" he said.
The little endearing word moved her more than the command.
"Come!" she said, as though it were rather the servant than herself that was responsible for the trouble, and walked straight down to the doolie.
The enemy had made another dash on the centre after the sortie, and as it was driven back the signal was given Dore for which he had so eagerly been waiting, Terrington's hand having been forced by the increasing number of the enemy in front of him, the Guides being still a long way to the rear.
A bugle call replied to the signal, and Dore's men opened fire instantly on the crowded road beneath them.
The Saris turned at the sound, to find themselves penned between two lines of fire and the precipices of the defile.
It was little wonder that panic seized them; the long deferred disclosure of the trap adding to their apprehensions. Those nearest Dore's ridge dashed for the gap without an attempt at resistance, and those in front, seeing their supports in flight, fell back, firing wildly in both directions.
The Bakót men finding the foe in retreat began to shoot with more effect, but Terrington, trusting rather to their knives for slaughter and feeling that the decisive moment was come, signalled to the Guides, still three miles away, to press forward, and ordered a general advance.
The Dogras, being on the lower ground, were the first to get within thrusting distance, and closed on a terrified huddle of men swinging this way and that in frenzied efforts to escape like a frightened flock of sheep, and crying out for mercy from the bayonets that pierced them from behind. The mercy meted out to them was the mercy of the Durbar—a swift end, and the scorn of born fighters in their ears; and, as the Bakót levies descended with their crooked knives upon the scurrying flanks, the Saris flung away their arms and fought with each other to escape the avengers.
Terrington stopped the pursuit with the utmost difficulty as it came under the fire which Dore was pouring upon the fugitives, and sent volley after volley with deadly effect into the maddened wedge of men penned in the gap. It was absolute butchery, and the struggling men fell to the bullets in sheaves across the road, the life blown out of them at three hundred paces.
The Sikhs continued to fire despite Terrington's attempt to stop them so long as any of the flying mob remained beneath them, and then, scampering over to the other side of the ridge, opened on the runaways as they emerged from the defile.
Terrington pushed the Dogras forward into the gap as soon as the bullets of the Sikhs had ceased to search it, and discovered at once, in spite of his advantage, the greatness of the task in front of him.
Mir Khan, realizing from the sound of battle in the defile the trick which had been played him, was throwing forward every man he could spare to shut Terrington within it till he could extricate the force which Walcot had skilfully drawn after him up the road to Rashát.
Terrington gathered at a glance that the disorder which the flight of the panic-stricken Saris was creating in the ranks of the reinforcements offered him the one chance of getting his transport out of the defile and of holding a fighting position on the ground beyond it.
So, though the Guides were not yet in sight, and his force utterly inadequate to the task before it, he pressed on upon the heels of the fugitives which were blinding the enemy's front, in order to give Dore's men on the south of the road an opening to descend from the ridge and crumple the broken flank back upon the centre. So soon as he saw that the Sikhs were in motion he pushed the Dogras forward in the centre to maintain touch with them, and cover the egress of his transport from the defile, taking the Bakót men along himself to prevent an enveloping movement on the other flank. This, the extreme right, was the weak point in his advance, since he had not sufficient men for an extension to gain the support of the hill-side, and the enemy's line was long enough to overlap him, and, by passing round his right, to force him off the road and close the entrance to the defile behind him while the Guides were still within it. This was the critical hour of the day, for Mir Khan, who had hurried back from the Gul to direct the attack, at once realized his advantage, and leaving his right to take care of itself, swung all his horsemen round to the other wing, and sent them dismounted clambering over the further slopes of the valley, while he himself advanced against Terrington in front. Sending word to the half of Dore's force, which still lined the ridge on the north of the gap, to get still higher up the hill and threaten in turn to outflank the enemy's flankers, Terrington set himself to hold the half-trained Bakót levies in a position which would have tried the morale of the best disciplined troops.
In this, without the special help of Heaven, he certainly would not have succeeded, since in order to keep his men together he had to expose himself in a fashion that should have brought death to him twenty times in the day.
Rose Chantry who, with the rest of the transport, had been hurried through the gap and left to find what cover they could in the open ground beyond it, watched him through her glasses, standing erect amongst the men who were crawling and slithering at his feet, with a growing wonderment of appreciation for the manner of man he was. She saw him pounce upon one skulker who was trying to slink away, lift him like a dog by the neck to his full length, march him forward in the face of the bullets, and fling him down again in the firing line.
The charmed life which he seemed to wear had its effect at last upon the superstitions of the men he was leading, and a fatalist spirit took the place of their fears. This improved their pluck if it did not mend their shooting; yet Terrington was compelled none the less to retire them, leaving his dead and badly wounded behind him, as the enemy's flankers had worked round far enough to enfilade him. He was thus compelled to fall back slowly for the better part of a mile, until his supports became entangled with the head of the transport column. This caused the officer in charge of the transport to attempt an immediate withdrawal, forgetting that the ground over which they had reached their present cover was now swept by the bullets which were passing over Terrington's head. The first two mules to emerge from the shelter of the rocks fell dead with their driver, and the significance of the little spirts of dust that barred the way was brought home to those that followed. The head of the column halted, the rest of it continued to advance, the mules becoming jammed into a huddled mass. Rose Chantry's bearers had picked her up when the retirement was ordered, and when it ceased and the crowding beasts began to accumulate round the doolie she put her head through the curtains and asked Gholam what had happened. He explained apologetically that the leaders of the transport were smitten with great fear.
"Go on," she shouted to her bearers, "and show them the way."
Gholam interpreted the order and the jampanis had shuffled timorously along for a few paces, when the enemy's flankers came in view of the disordered transport and with cries of triumph began to shoot down into it from the hill.
One of the jampanis was hit in the first fusillade, and, another dropping with fright, the doolie came with a crash to the ground, and Rose scrambled out of it, her teeth set and a little revolver in her hand, to face what would probably have proved the closing scene of the day's fight, had not, at that moment, the leading company of the Guides emerged from the defile.
They had come for three miles at the double and had no breath for shouting, but they extended with parade precision, and went straight for the scattered sharpshooters on the enemy's left.
But the day was too old for half measures. With a faith in reinforcements and a strong front, Terrington signalled Afzul Singh, who had, despite his forty-five years, outpaced on foot the youngest of his men, to keep his right shoulder up, thus ignoring the enemy's left and bringing the Guides through the broken Bakót men on the main road. Then, as the panting line came up to him, Terrington put himself in front of it and charged straight at Mir Khan's centre.
That part of the enemy's front, unaware, owing to the slope of the ground, of the Guides' arrival, only waited a snap of the trigger, as the wave of buff-clad men burst over the rise. Then it turned and ran.
Blown though his men were, Terrington carried them half a mile further before halting them. By doing so he cut in halves Mir Khan's line of battle and isolated his entire left wing, which did not need a second volley from the Guides to explain what had happened, and in an instant was leaping like a flock of goats over the shale slopes in wild retreat.
Leaving Afzul with half a company to complete the rout, Terrington wheeled the other half to the left, and, coming into line with the Dogras and Sikhs, fell upon the enemy's right, which had seen the defeat of the centre, and pressed it hotly down the hill.
He only carried the pressure far enough to clear the road, and, as soon as the second company of the Guides appeared in the gap to form his rear-guard a general movement began across the valley towards the Sorágh Gul; the Sikhs, Dogras and half a company of the Guides covering the transport on the south side, the second company of the Guides, breathless but athirst for battle, holding the road behind it, and the Bakót men still running like hounds over the great shale slopes on the north hacking down the flying Saris with their knives or shooting them like rabbits at a dozen yards.
It was a triumph of unhoped-for victory, but even yet was not complete. For the swiftness of Terrington's advance brought him to the Gul before the men who had been pursuing Walcot could recross it after the news of Mir Khan's defeat had reached their ears. The Gul was a ravine with sides almost precipitous and close upon two hundred feet in depth, with a torrent raging over its rocks which could only be forded at one place.
Walcot, reinforced by Freddy Gale with the garrison of Rashát had turned upon his pursuers, who reached in their flight one side of the Gul as Terrington's force appeared on the other.
Panic-stricken they plunged into its abyss to escape the bullets behind them, hoping to hide amongst the boulders in the torrent's bed.
But the river had risen behind them, and a foaming floor of water stretched from side to side of the chasm.
Clinging like conies to those bare declivities they were shot screaming for mercy or insane with fear, and fell like blood-gutted leeches into the flood beneath.
Terrington watched the slaughter, silent and stern, feeling to be but the avenging instrument of God, yet wishing for the qualities of a god to reconcile him to its pitilessness and inevitable injustice.
While he watched, his ear caught the click of little feet on the rocks, and he turned to find Rose Chantry beside him, gazing down upon the torment of that gulf of death.
"Go back!" he said hurriedly. "You mustn't see this."
She turned to him a little face fierce and white and ablaze with vengeance.
"Ishallsee it," she cried imperiously; "they killed my husband."
Yet her vengeance came rather from the relief of long pent anxiety, and it was less of her husband that she was thinking than of the man who had come back to her out of mortal danger, his coat ripped by bullets in two places and a dark scum of dried blood across his face from a flesh-wound in the temple.
After a brief halt for a meal, Terrington sent on the Dogras to convoy the wounded to Rashát, the Bakót levies following at midnight with the transport. He would rely only on his tried fighters for the long rearguard action which would begin on the morrow, and only end beyond the Paldri.
But though the struggle of the next few days would mean hardship for all and death to many, the worst was over with that day's ordeal, on which had hung the safety of the entire force. Had Terrington been beaten, every man with him would have been massacred, Rashát would have fallen within a month, and his name held up to the scorn of the years to come as of one who had lacked the courage to stand to his post. Yet his victory had been, under Heaven, but an accident. He knew that well enough. That fight, the most sanguine for its size in Indian history, which has coloured the name as it dyed the water of Rashát river, would have been lost but for the arrival at its crisis of men on whose coming he had no right to count. It was won indeed, won in its overwhelming effectiveness by his subtlety, his daring tactics, his personal valour, but it would have been lost despite all those, despite any devices that men could have contrived, had not a certain company of the Guides possessed the splendid training and the undauntable energy of the men whom Afzul Singh had led.
Yet now he had, thanks to them, the redounding credit of it, who, but for them, would have borne its enduring shame.
Determined to hold the Gul on the morrow as long as possible, Terrington halted the Guides on the further side of it, and ordered them to turn in as soon as they had made a meal, while the Sikhs prepared defences and furnished pickets for the night. The Guides, save for their three miles' scurry, had been under fire all the way from Sar, and had not left a man behind them. Keen soldiers all of them, they forgot their own part in the day's success, and, when Terrington went down to inspect their camp, gathered from their cooking-pots and cheered him tempestuously.
Terrington laid his hand affectionately on Afzul's shoulder.
"You did it," he said gratefully; "you did it!"
The circle about his own camp fire was completed by Walcot and Freddy Gale, and it was there that Rose Chantry watched the ways of men who have come out of battle. Walcot, who had fought well and been slightly wounded in the shoulder, seemed unable to talk enough. Speech gurgled out of him like rain from a gargoyle. Freddy Gale listened, throwing in brief descriptive touches, his round merry face convulsed from time to time with infectious laughter. Terrington, who sat beside her, said nothing at all, but the keenness of his eyes was softened by a grave content.
Rose noticed the warmth of his greeting to Gale and his evident gladness to have a man under him on whose knowledge and judgment he could depend. Once, when leaning forward across the fire after dinner to ask Walcot a question, she put her hand unawares on Terrington's, which was lying on the ground. He did not move, and she took it in so tight a grip, that, as she settled herself again, he turned his head and looked smiling into her eyes.
The enemy had been so roughly handled that Mir Khan could not persuade his men on the morrow to a fresh attack across such an obstacle as the Gul, and Terrington after holding it till nightfall fell back upon Rashát.
But before he reached it the Saris were again upon his heels like a pack of famished wolves, ravenous for blood. During the three days' march to the foot of the Palári, the fighting never ceased night or day. In the dark it dwindled to the buzz or the slap of the sniper's bullet, varied by an attempt to rush a picket; doing only occasional damage but keeping the whole camp awake, and causing a suppression of the fires whose warmth was becoming with every hour more essential.
Dawn generally brought an attack on two or three points at once, and persistent efforts were made during the day to outclimb the British flanking parties and command the line of march.
Once, when these were successful, Terrington only obtained relief by an attack upon the centre, threatening the safety of the men above the valley, but the effort proved so expensive that he was obliged in the future still further to extend his wings and retire by continuous echelon up and down the slope of the hills. It was slow work.
Then, too, though his losses were not heavy, the carriage of the wounded was an increasing labour, and he was finally obliged to dismount the Lancers and use their beasts for his injured men.
The first fringe of the snow was hailed, for all its augury of hardship, with a shout of welcome.
As the men's feet slipped in its yielding softness, their eyes followed the vast white slope that stretched above them till it was lost in the grayness of the sullen sky. There, close under the heavens, tormented by winds that powdered the snowflakes into icy points and whirled them to and fro in furious eddies, lay the road to safety.
There was death in its blinding whiteness, death in its numbing torpor death in its piercing cold; but beyond was life and wife and honour and reward.
The sight of the snow drove Mir Khan to more desperate means, for, without some critical success, beyond the Palári he dared not go, since his opponents might be able to count on reinforcement, and the pass close behind him.
But to Terrington the pressure of the enemy now became less serious than the difficulties of the road. His men soon learnt the value of snow as a protection, and snow entrenchments were much more rapidly constructed than stone sangars. But with every march the strength of his coolies was declining, and they could scarcely carry their reduced loads. The horses, barely able to keep their footing on the frozen ground, became at once exhausted when the deep snow was reached, and had to be killed and eaten. This brought him almost to the end of his fuel, and left the wounded to be carried by effectives who were already beginning to feel the strain of constant fighting and the toil of forcing their way through a foot's depth of snow. Moreover every hour of ascent brought them into an air perceptibly rarer, and increased grievously the stress of every added effort.
On the second day they reached the terrible region of the winds, and for three hours waited helpless in a blast of icy crystals that cut the face till it bled, and froze the eyelids with the tears that it brought to them, and made every breath a pain.
The storm struck without warning. The snow ahead seemed suddenly to rise on end; the next instant the awful gray mist of ice was tearing past them. For those three hours it was impossible to move or to see. The air seemed as thick as a river jellied with snow, and even when the eyes could be opened, the clotted whiteness hid the end of one's arm. Where the men clung together in frightened and shivering groups, the wind piled drifts on the lee side up to their necks.
It seemed as though the snows of all the mountains was being swept into the sea, and yet scarcely a flake fell upon the rear-guard, fighting some few hundred feet below.
Terrington was alone when it fell, riding along the column, persuading, encouraging, helping, threatening; lifting, by sheer strength of will, the tired trail of men higher and higher. He slid off his shaggy barebacked little pony, turned its tail to the wind, and leant against it for the warmth which he knew both soon would need. He had an immense capacity for patience, but it failed him now; and its failure taught him what otherwise he might have waited long to learn. For through those long bitter hours it was not of his men that he thought—his men who had been his only care and love for years—but of Rose Chantry. Thought of her, crouching frightened in her doolie, fallen somewhere in the snow, the warmth going surely hour by hour from her frail shivering little body, the cold fingers of death slowly closing upon her, and no one by to bring her comfort and help her to be brave. The thought was agony to him, and by the agony he knew that it was love. Light, vain, fickle, ignorant, there were reasons enough, and he knew them, for not even liking her. He did not know, for that matter, if he did like her. He longed with indescribable solicitude to see her face again. That was all he knew.
Even the cold that crept numbingly through him could not stifle that desire. If the storm lasted for six hours no living thing would be left in the pass. He was not afraid of that. He feared to outlive it and find her dead.
Yet when the storm ceased as suddenly as it began, he made no search for her. He was still that much master of himself. Finding a floor of rock swept bare by the wind, he diverted the line of march across it, and there, with Clones, inspected all the men as they passed for frost-bite; and soon had a row of them laid out under blankets and vigorously rubbed with snow.
The wounded had suffered most; all the worst cases were dead, many were past help, and none had escaped injury: after them came the baggage carriers, ill-clad and ill-nourished as they were, nearly all of whom had paid for the exposure with a frozen foot or finger.
It was right at the end of the transport that Rose's doolie appeared, and to Terrington's immense relief she thrust out her head from the curtains as the bearers halted. It was a face fearfully pinched and cold, but there was a new spirit behind it, for she would not speak of her own ailings, but insisted upon getting out to rub the hands of the frozen, till Clones, seeing she was likely to faint from fatigue, put her back in the doolie.
On that night they camped below the Palári, and the next day it was crossed by the entire force.
But though the wind spared them, that day was the most trying of the retreat.
The blazing sun upon the snow after the storm had produced a rapid increase of snow blindness. Of the English officers Terrington alone was unaffected, the others all having to be led, Walcot especially being much disfigured and in great pain.
The blinded men went hand in hand in single file with a leader who could still see the track to each squad of ten, the skin of their faces blistered and bleeding, their eyes crimson and inflamed, and tears trickling continuously from them, to freeze upon their cheeks.
At a height of twelve thousand feet each movement was a struggle, and, from ceaseless fighting, marching and want of sleep, every nerve and muscle were at the breaking point. Gale, blind and worn out, but cheery as ever, facing a fight which he could not see, kept the rear-guard in splendid shape, and Clones, though blind also and suffering from frost-bite, continued to feel his way among the wounded.
The faith of all was pinned desperately upon Terrington, and keen the anxiety about his sight. It was perhaps sheer determination which kept him as impervious to the glare as to fatigue.
Tired out he was, and knew he was, but he seemed able to hold his tiredness at arm's length for so long as he was needed.
By evening the last man was clear of the pass; the enemy had not dared to cross it, so the British force was practically safe from pursuit, and on the morrow would be dropping down towards the green valleys and the south. But only a few of the hardier hill-men had energy to kindle smoking fires of the wet brushwood they were able to collect.
Terrington had gone round the camps to say a cheering word to the men and see if all that was possible for the frozen and wounded had been done; and at last, his task ended, turned with foreboding to the green tent, which Gholam had pitched warily in a crevice of the rocks.
In the supreme effort of that crowning day he had not seen Rose since the night before, when she had seemed achingly weak and ill.
She was sitting on the mattress, all her rugs piled about her, shivering. She burst into tears as he knelt down beside her.
"My feet are frozen," she sobbed, "my feet are frozen."
He had her boots off in an instant, and set the lantern on the ground, searching anxiously for the fatal whitening of the flesh. But though her feet were absolutely numb the frost-bite had but just begun, and half an hour's vigorous rubbing took the whiteness out of them; and then Terrington chafed them gently, and breathed on them, and wrapped them under his coat to bring the blood back to them as imperceptibly as possible while Rose sat with hands clenched and face working, smiling at his tenderness and crying with pain.
But in that torture of recovery she reached her limit of endurance. The cold had sunk into her soul, and when Gholam brought in the smoky lukewarm mess, which was all that even his adroitness could contrive in that white waste she turned her head away from it, saying wearily that she did not want to eat.
Terrington, with a sense of difficulty beside which the leading of men was a simple matter, sat down on the mattress beside her and put his arm supportingly about her shoulders.
"I'm going to feed you," he said.
She tried to meet his mothering with a smile, but as the flap of the tent lifted with a blast of wind, which flung a spray of snow over them, she shivered and shrank back, shaking her head.
"It doesn't matter if I eat or not," she said despairingly. "I can't live another night with the cold. I wished I could die all last night, it was such dreadful pain. I can't stand it any more."
For answer he drew her a little closer to him.
"God's brought us to the end of our trouble, child," he said. "To-morrow it will be all going down, down, down, and warmer and warmer every hour. You've only to make a fight of it just this one night more—for my sake," he added.
She shook her head despondently, but he thrust his fork into the dish, and brought a morsel of meat to her mouth, and made her eat it. And so, coaxing and commanding, he forced a meal upon her, eating one himself to give her time, and she leant against him with her head upon his shoulder, faintly happy, but shivering at every blast that pierced the chinks of the tent.
He rose when she had finished and laid her down on the mattress, wrapping her up in everything he could find.
"You're not going away?" she murmured apprehensively.
"Only to have another look at the men," he said, tucking the rugs closer about her.
"You'll come back; promise you'll come back," she pleaded anxiously.
Kneeling down beside her, he bent down and kissed her forehead gently.
"The moment I can," he said.
He tightened the flaps of the tent, and set Gholam Muhammed to pile snow about the skirts of it. Then he went on to the camp.
He found everything there very much in need of him. The plans he had made had not been completed. The men, utterly worn out, had flung themselves down too tired even to care for self-preservation.
Walcot was seriously ill; Gale, Dore, Clones, and the two senior native officers were all blind, and so were ignorant of what had been left undone.
Freddy Gale, though he had twice fallen from exhaustion, had directed personally the issue of rations, and used every chance to cheer his men; but he missed that sense of their condition, and they the sense of his control, which can come from sight alone.
They lay in the snow, inert, benumbed, certain victims to that frozen sleep from which there is no wakening. Only the old soldiers of the Guides had stretched their blankets, and made any likeness to a bivouac.
Terrington's voice came upon the scene like the call of a bugle. There was help in it and scorn and energy and command, and, behind if, unconquerable will and eyes that saw. The men dragged themselves to their feet, and straightened themselves to match its clear direction. Order after order rang out, like the voice of a ship's captain shortening sail, quick, certain, vivid with necessity, but cool as the dew. The heaps of men became ranks that took shape and moved. Rifles rose on end, blankets were slung between them, and slowly the crescent camp came into being, which should offer least resistance to and most shelter from a storm. The little hospital leanto was enlarged, the worst cases were brought in and treated, and then laid for warmth one upon the other at the end of it.
For close on three hours Terrington's labour never ceased for a second, and the camp lived upon his voice. He did not leave it till he had seen every man with some covering over him, and some food to eat; not, indeed, till maternally, he had tucked them all into bed. Then, hoarse with shouting and drunk with fatigue, he staggered back to the little green tent.
Rose turned her head as he entered, but the eyes were strange to him. He kneeled down beside her, dried the snow from his hand, and laid the back of it upon her cheek. Her skin was gray and mortally cold.
"I'm dying," she whispered.
He felt her hands, which were blue and lifeless, and with no flutter of a pulse. The air in the little tent was a long way below the freezing-point, and it was quite evident that she was slowly sinking into the torpor from which she never could be roused.
He chafed her hands, but no heat came to them; she merely turned from him with a weary gesture to be left alone. Then he pressed her palms against the talc of the lantern, but the flickering candle seemed to give out no warmth. Then, suddenly, a thought struck him with the fierce hazard of despair.
He gazed at her in doubt for a moment, then he got up, dusted the flakes of snow from his riding-breeches and drew off his long boots.
Rose turned her head away from him on the pillow with a sigh and closed her eyes. She was slipping happily away from him into the land of shadows.
Terrington took off his greatcoat and spread it over her. Then he lifted the wraps that covered her, and lying down upon the mattress slowly drew them over himself as well. She turned again, childishly fretful at being disturbed. Running a finger down the buttons of his patrol, Terrington raised himself, and taking her in his arms drew her under him, spreading his body upon hers.
Though he was heated with exertion, it was a long time before any warmth could melt its way into her chilled flesh. Terrington pressed his face against hers, first to one cold cheek and then to another, breathing, as one thaws a window pane, upon her neck. At last, when he had almost lost hope of saving her, she made a little nestling motion towards him like a frozen bird before the fire. Then her breath began to be audible, and she gave long sighs as though to free herself of his weight upon her.
Terrington's limbs were numb with the intentness of their pressure, and his arms, folded about her, had fallen asleep. The cold seemed to lie like a wet sheet over his back.
Presently Rose moved beneath him, a movement of her whole body: her eyes opened, met his without wonder, and closed again with a sigh of content. Her arms straightened, and then, loosening limply from the shoulders, slipped to her sides. She seemed to soften and grow supple beneath him and her breath came evenly between her lips. She was asleep.
Terrington raised himself slightly, and so stayed all the night.
The agonies that he suffered from cold, cramp, and the stubborn struggle with fatigue passed what he had thought possible to human endurance.
In the gray of the morning she opened her eyes again.
"Nevile!" she exclaimed, as though she had but just parted with him in a dream.
She had pushed in wonderment her hands against him, and he fell over as though his arms had been cut off. She stared an instant at his grotesque efforts to move, then with a sudden passion of enlightenment seized his useless arms.
"Nevile, Nevile!" she cried, "what have you done for me? You've saved my life."
He smiled dimly, trying to lift himself upon his elbows, but dropped back again.
"Have I?" he said.
Her left arm went like a snake about his shoulder, and her face came down quick and close to his.
"Why did you do it?" she asked almost angrily.
"I love you, dear," he said.
After the night under that gable in the roof of the world, many things happened; but there ended the siege of Sar. For Sar is, in the old tongue of Maristan, the word that stood alike for the kingdom's centre, the heart's core, and this was a siege unprepared and unintended, by a girl of a man's heart. For it was to the girl that he surrendered.
The rest of the retreat, the cold neglect with which the Government of India tried to treat the little force, the angry expostulation of the Press of England, and the tardy honours, are they not written in the book of the Rulers of India, and in the heart of a people that does not forget?
But with his crossing of the Palári, Terrington's achievement ceases. The rest was mere marching. Thanks, indeed, to his diplomacy it was mere marching, and that not a sword was drawn against him on the road home. But he thought little of such success; he had a natural capacity, he said, for creating false impressions.
He came very near incapacity during the first day of the descent: for his vigil of the night before had cost him the use of both his arms and legs. Rose prayed him to be carried in her doolie, but he knew the effect the breakdown of his seemingly unassailable strength would have upon his men, and had himself tied upon the back of his little pony, and led, with no slackening for his infirmities, wherever his encouragement or his counsel was required.
The perpetual jogging down-hill was, in his condition, not a bad imitation of martyrdom, which, in his heart he bore as deserved for having spent his strength upon a woman instead of for his men.
But the power came back to his arms by the way, perhaps from sheer pain; and the use he found for them at the end of the day, when, though still in the snow, the weary little band gathered warm and happy about fires of fir, certainly suggested no regrets to the woman they enfolded.
The man who was sitting at the writing-table had not raised his head for half an hour from between his hands.
When at last he lifted his face, after a third knock upon the door, the prints of his fingers were branded across its grayness in livid streaks.
The hall-boy who entered, after waiting vainly for permission, handed him a telegram, which he opened and spread out on the desk before him.
He stared at it blankly, with his temples upon his wrists, until the boy, tired of waiting, asked if there were any answer.
Terence turned and looked at him as though unable to account for his presence.
The boy repeated his question, and Terence shook his head, resting it again upon his hands as the door closed upon the messenger, gazing down uncomprehendingly upon the thin pink sheet.
Presently, however, the meaning of what lay before him filtered into his consciousness. It was an invitation of no moment, but it needed a reply. He drew out a sheaf of forms from a pigeon-hole, wrote a refusal, rang for the boy, and sent it off.
The incident passed at once from his mind, but it had disturbed his absorption.
He rose and paced slowly and aimlessly about the room, gazing blindly out of the window and at the engravings upon the walls. There was something curious in the combined looseness and stiffness of his movements: he seemed literally to be dragging himself about.
When he sat down again he turned his chair slightly from the table, and leaning back in it, stared out at the gray day with a look of dazed pain upon his face.
So he remained while an hour went over; as still, as empty, as a deserted house.
Then, with a deeper breath and the same confused slowness in his movements, he drew an envelope from his pocket, and spread out the sheet within it upon the desk. The lines it carried covered but a single page, and he had read them through a dozen times.
They came from a woman whom he had loved more than his own soul, and they cast him, with freezing contempt, out of her sight for ever.
He read the bitter words again, hoping their sharp edge would make a wound of self-respect in the consciousness they had benumbed. But he tried in vain to hurt his pride, or by any fresh vexation to escape from the torment of his thoughts.
Earth is jealous of its anodynes, even of pain that brings oblivion or of death that means release. He refolded the letter and returned it to his pocket, knowing that in half an hour he would be reading it again.
Meanwhile a new impulse moved him.
Leaning forward, he slid back a secret door in the top of his desk, and took from the space behind it a bundle of letters. They were in envelopes of almost every hue and shape, but all were directed by the same hand, in a vain weak sprawling character.
Terence drew the packet towards him, and set his fingers on the string.
Then with a shudder he pushed it from him, and thrust his face into his hands.
Under those harlequin covers were hidden the one chance of happiness for his life, and the reputation of a woman.
He could make them yield which of the two he chose; but the other must be destroyed.
It was nearly two years since he had first seen his name written in that hand, a very short while after he had made acquaintance with the writer.
She had stirred his curiosity from the moment he met her; partly by something tragic in her beauty, which was indubitable; partly by some quality which he found repellent even in her attraction. She bore a well known name, but her husband's estates were encumbered; every place he had was let, and they entertained but little. Terence had known the latter slightly for some years, and disliked him extremely. He was a man with a predilection for any sport in which something suffered, provided it could be followed in comfort; and he openly lamented having married for love—as he termed it—instead of putting up his peerage to the bidding of the States.
Terence had pitied any one who might have to do with him, and was thus already at a sympathetic angle on meeting his wife.
She surprised him by her detachment from the world in which she lived. She viewed it with vague eyes, knowing of its happenings only from what was told her, and divining neither their probability nor their consequence.
Nothing, dropped into her mind, seemed to fructify: it lay there like seed upon a rock. To Terence, whose chief resource was his ignorance, such detachment appeared incredible.
He thought her beauty of itself would have proved a sufficient link with life, or with at least the deadlier forms of it which wear the name in London. A woman with her eyes was generally enabled to foresee some of the surprises in the Book of Judgment. Men looked to that.
But it was clear to Terence that she foresaw nothing. If corruption had approached her, it had failed to get not a hearing only, but a seeing. Whatever place there might be for it in her heart, there was plainly none in her intelligence: she did not even know it by sight.
Terence guessed that from the men she knew, and by the way she knew them. She had evidently no instructive sense of a bad lot. A bad woman had that, and often added hatred to it; a good woman had it, and added pity. She had it not at all.
He found consequently no compliment in the gracious way she had received him, and no seduction in the enquiring sadness of her eyes. Since the meeting was at Ascot, and she was exquisitely dressed, he tried all the frivolous topics he thought might interest her; then some of the serious ones which interested him. She seemed about equally bored with either, and he was surprised when she asked on parting, with a curious gravity of request, if he would come and see her.
He saw her twice in town. She had named her day, but he had forgotten it and gone on another. So she wrote, finding his card, to arrange a meeting, and, after it, offered him another afternoon. Terence was on each occasion her only visitor, and surmised that he was not so by chance.
Yet he found it difficult to account for the privilege.
They seemed to have little in common, not even the tongue in which they talked. Both appeared to be translating their thoughts before speaking them.
Terence felt stupidly ineffective, and wondered in what straits of tedium she might be living on receiving, a day or two later, an invitation to spend a week end at Wallingford, where her husband had taken a summer house.
He hesitated; (to be desired despite such a show of dulness seemed almost pathetic); accepted, hoping that work would intervene; but in the end, went.
He told himself that it would be outdoor weather, a house party, and he should see little of his hostess.
It was outdoor weather; but the party had been arranged for pairing, and he saw little but his hostess.
They spent the days upon the dozing river, and sat together late into the warm nights upon the lawn.
He knew nothing about women, and did not understand their ways. Therefore he was gravely interested in the account she set before him of her groping soul.
He had never imagined any conception of existence so out of touch with reality as were her beliefs. Her idealism would have discredited a schoolgirl's fiction, and she clung to it as though there were some merit in being deceived.
Such determination to remain in the dark almost angered him.
"But men and women aren't like that," he expostulated more than once.
"That's what people are always telling me," she replied pathetically: "but why aren't they?"
He hadn't, as he assured her, the remotest notion; his interest lying, not in what men weren't, but in what they were.
He tried to impart that interest in her, but without success.
If men were the brutes they seemed proud to be, she asserted vigorously, she didn't care how ill she knew them.
But it was clear that she had higher hopes of humanity than she confessed, and it would have been clear to any one but Terence that those hopes were becoming centred on himself.
What men said of him had roused her incredulous admiration, and he seemed to dislike women as much as he respected them. His honesty, his deference, and his grave good looks attracted her from the first; his sympathy and discernment riveted the attraction. He reproved her optimism in vain; for was he not its embodiment?
Terence, unconscious of being anything but a somewhat poor companion, discussed the sentiments she suggested, growing ever more astounded by her severance from realities, and more touched by her unhappy days.
Of her husband's life he knew more than she had surmised, but she had surmised enough to make wifehood an indignity. His unfaithfulness, as a stye by which she had to live, soured for her every odour in the world. She had not the vigour to ignore it, nor the courage to escape. She had dreamed of marriage as a royal feast; she woke to find herself among the swine.
The discovery would have hardened some women into defiance; some would have sheltered with it their own intrigues; but the shock cowed in her all further curiosity in existence. If life were really like the bit she had tasted, she preferred to starve. The other men she met seemed as horrible as her husband; they had the same speech, the same jests, the same dissipations.
She shrank more and more into herself; even women revolted her by their tolerance of men's presumptions.
Then Terence came. Like a plant grown in darkness, her anaemic delicacy of thought responded with an unhealthy exuberance to the first ray of sunlight. She listened to his silences and found them refreshing; then she drew him into speech.
He spoke of much that she could not understand, but his obscurities were an intoxication, and not, as those of other men, a dread. She felt there was something wide and fine behind his words; a coherence, an integrity; she was vaguely pleased to feel it there, though its quality did not interest her at all. What did was her own expansion in the atmosphere of sympathetic confidence it had created.
Her expansiveness was, at times, distasteful to him. The secrets of a woman's moral toilet-table may be more disconcerting than those her boudoir guarded. To be discursive about either seemed to him to lack the finer reticence of life. A man's sight, if he could see at all, was a sufficient sentry to his admiration; and the little it allowed him he might be suffered to enjoy. To label the false wherever one found it would be to leave a world only fit for fools.
Terence, however, wronged her by imagining her confidences habitual. He suggested the insecurity of entrusting such things to men.
"To men!" she exclaimed, shrinking. "Do you suppose I do?"
He did; but renounced the conception penitently in view of her dismay, and lent a more consciously honoured, if more embarrassed ear. But compassion overcame his embarrassment; and he thought less often of her indiscretions than of her loneliness.
She asked him to spend a week at Wallingford when the season was over.
"I have very few friends," she said; "and no one but you has ever helped me to understand."
He wondered to what he had helped her, and whether he would recognize it if she told him; but he did not wonder if he might remit the helping; the disadvantage in the gift of oneself being that the giving is never at an end.
So he came to Wallingford again in September, when the moonlight fell nightly on white veils of mist, and the world took on a golden ripeness in the mellow silent days.
Some letters, in the meanwhile, had passed between them; letters which might have made Terence uneasy had he known what they meant. Instead, he answered them, and consigned their intentions to the chaos of feminine incomprehensibility. Some of that chaos took a shape during his second stay at Wallingford sufficiently definite and disconcerting.
It was probably only what had been put, to no purpose, in her letters, but it had another significance when spoken with rather uncomfortable pauses and lit with the intensity of a woman's very lovely eyes.
To mistake its meaning was impossible; to ignore it seemed to Terence a contemptible discretion. He could not withdraw his sympathy because it had been so dangerously misapplied, but he tried, with fraternal frankness, to abstract from it the odour of personality with which she had scented it.
He hoped to animate her with the big issues of life, but to a woman there is often no issue bigger than a man's devotion.
As they hung in the skiff beneath the birches of the mill-pond one breathless afternoon, she let him realize the fruitlessness of his intentions.
The sun that filled the drowsy air fell in dazzling patches on her white frock; there was not a sound save the dull drone of the weir, and deep in the shade a kingfisher sat motionless above the water, like a blue flame upon the bough.
She had been silent for some while after his last remark, looking away from him towards the river; then, to Terence's dismay, she leant forward, hiding her face in her hands, and began to sob.
He was paralyzed by his ignorance of any cause for tears, perplexed with self-reproaches, helplessness, and pity. It seemed equally absurd to ask why she was crying, or to offer comfort until he knew. He sat wretchedly mute for some moments, and at last begged her to let him hear what ailed her.
She did not answer till he had repeated the request, and then faltered between her sobs: "Oh, you wouldn't understand, you couldn't understand: I've got no one to care for me, no one, no one!"
He could think of no response to that which did not sound inane. He had not heard a woman cry since his sisters left the schoolroom, and no other form of consolation occurred to him than the brotherly caresses which had served him then.
Yet not till his ineptitude and apparent apathy became intolerable did he lean forward from the thwart and rest his hand upon her knee.
With the channel of that touch between them, the soothing trifles became easy which had been impossible of speech before.
Uncertain of what she might find consoling, he spoke as to a child whom he had found in tears; a murmur merely of the gentleness and pity which were in his heart.
She paid, for some time, no heed to him, but her sobs relaxed, and presently, though with her face still hidden, she laid a wet hand on his.
"Do you really mean it?" she faltered searchingly.
"Of course I mean it," he replied, wondering what his meaning was supposed to be, but resolute to stand to this poor creature for any kindness and fortitude there might be in the world.
"You're very, very good," she said; but her eyes had in them, even to his discernment, an appreciation of another sort of worth.
That was at the beginning of the afternoon; yet, though he sculled her up stream later, to taste, melting in the heated air, the moist coolness under Bensington weir, and higher, afterwards, to the "Swan" for tea, she made no reference to that understanding which was by him so little understood.
But she was more than usually silent, and there was a dream-haze across the purple depths of her eyes, which only parted when she looked at him. Then the wonderful colour seemed to flood them, and she smiled faintly in the furthest crevice of her lips, as though they had been touched by the tips of some feathery pleasure.
But to Terence that sweetness of a shared secret in her smile was immensely discomposing.
That, he recognized, when he came to look back, was the moment of warning.
At that he had his fears, never stirred before; at that he should have taken flight.
Flight was the way of men; of men timorous and importuned; perhaps, often, the only way. But he had not the courage for such a show of fear; even flight seemed to affront a woman's confidence.
A sheaf of letters at breakfast offered him that bridge of fabulous affairs over which so many a man of wider experience would have escaped. But he gave it never a thought. Where was fraternity in the world if one had to flee from the first woman who dared to claim it? He would as soon have fled from an infectious fever!
There were closer points in the comparison than he supposed—though the world does not equally admire the man who imperils the safety of his life and him who risks the peace of it—but perception of them would not have changed his mind.
He stayed because he could not go.
The morning of the day that followed was spent by every one on the shady lawn. It was too hot for even the theory of movement, and plans were postponed until the afternoon. Terence had meant to sketch a piece of stonework at Ewelme Church, but found himself engaged by his hostess to drive her to Nuneham.
Whether she intended to go there or not, she pleaded the heat as an excuse for deferring the start till it became too late to make one.
They had tea in the little Doric shrine that overlooked the river, and she took him afterwards up to the wood that rose behind the house.
Seated on a stile within it, against which he leaned, she told him the dream with which her eyes had been clouded the day before; told it with a hesitating persuasiveness which made dissent seem brutal; the dream of an ethereal alliance to which the man should bring a life, and the woman a use for it.
Terence listened stupefied as the naïve unsteady voice made out its astounding offer. She had gathered somehow his desire for such a thing; the magnifying power of her vanity must have revealed it in all he did and said. And her abysmal lack of humour concealed its grotesque disparities. He, so it seemed, was to contribute his existence, and she, a smile.
But if its seriousness was an absurdity, its absurdities were serious. Terence heard them with grave lips; heard in them, too, the diffident whispers of his pity swollen by her fancy to a blare of passion.
It was serious enough as she sounded it, and sad enough too. Disillusionment, even the gentlest, seemed out of the question.
How, to a woman who rides, triumphing in his devotion, through the barriers of her decorum, is a man to say, "I do not love you"?
There was nothing less that could be said: nothing less, at least, that was not a lie: for less, to her ears, would have said nothing. Love alone was her warrant, her title; and she had thrust his love into her helm.
There could be no other disillusionment but to take that from her, and to take it from her was to drag her to the dust.
So Terence listened. The bronze stems of the hazel saplings shone before him like prison bars, but he nodded now and then as she spoke her faith, and gazed at the golden air that burned beyond them in the west.
"I've never trusted any man enough," she ended, "to tell him all that I've told you; but you've made me believe in you; I don't know how. I suppose it really is because you're good and true. But are you quite, quite sure I mean so much to you, and that caring for me won't spoil your life?"
"One never knows what may spoil one's life," said Terence gravely "and seldom what may spoil another's; but I think it's true that you may trust me, and I'll try to be to you the friend that you desire."
He gave her his hand with boyish candour; and she held it, saying nothing, and not looking into his face.
When she released it, presently, she slid from the stile; and, turning, faced the sunset which had gilded his hair.
She was standing close to and partly in front of him, and so watched with him for a while, in silence, the setting splendours of the day.
Then, with a little sigh, she leaned back against his shoulder. Thus they stood some moments longer without a word; Terence braced to bear her weight; braced mentally to meet whatever might be coming, conscious of the beat against him of her quickened breath.
Then, with her dark head tilted back, she turned her face slowly towards him till it almost touched his lips.
For an instant he hated her, fiercely, impotently. The next, he put his hand gently upon her shoulder and kissed her cheek.
That kiss dated naturally a new era in their relations; not outwardly at first, to an appreciable extent, but with a difference immense in implication, in understanding.
Terence, forced to stay at Wallingford a day longer than he had intended, tried to put the added time to profit.
He saw that the chief danger lay in the hazy country of her expectations.
Her life had been turned upside down with joy, its dulness was on fire with an undreamed-of satisfaction; and she neither knew nor cared what might come next, so long as it kept the flame that was lit in her alive.
She lived for the unexpected, and she would show no discrimination in accepting it. Everything in that land was so new to her that no one thing seemed more alien than another; nothing had a special air of peril or of safety, of warning or of promise: all things were equally and perturbingly improbable, and supreme.
Terence realized how vague suddenly had become all her boundaries of conduct, and desired without delay to fix a frontier beyond which neither of them should go.
He would withdraw from nothing that his kiss had even seemed to promise; but he wished to put what it had not inalterably beyond her reach.
The optimism of such a hope can only be accounted for by his absolute ignorance of women; but her shyness, in a situation so strange to her, seemed to justify it while he remained at Wallingford.
But later, as her letters began to multiply, he realized how profound was his mistake. She rode her fancy wherever it led her, and he might as well have tried to fix a frontier for the north wind.
She wrote persistently of his love, of its greatness, its gladness, its splendid illumination of her life.
Her exultation in a thing which had no real existence was terrible to Terence.
Her dull unhappy being was transformed by a miracle as wonderful as that which creates the glory of painted wings from a withered chrysalis.
And he had wrought it. He, by some ignorant magic, had set her life afloat on pinions frailer and more resplendent than a butterfly's, to touch which roughly was to destroy her.
That was, of course, too brutal to be thought of. He must accept what he had done, however little he had meant to do it; must trust to time to dull its marvel and bring the woman back to earth.
But there seemed little likelihood of that at first, and with the increasing rapture of her letters Terence grew ever more dismayed.
Yet if he tried to lure her down to sanity, an agonized reply would be flung at him by the post's return, only to make his fears more vivid, and to compel from him, in sheer abasement, an expression of sentiment which he not only did not possess, but would have shrunk from possessing.
"Swear," she had written, not once, nor twice; "swear that you love no other woman; that you have never loved another woman; that I fill all your thoughts!"
Those were easy oaths, and true; but they did not content her. It was not enough that no other woman had a lien upon his past: his whole existence must be proscribed for her.
"Tell me," she prayed, "that I shall be everything to you always! It kills me to think that any love could move you after mine. I cannot have renounced my pride, my honour, my self-respect, for less than that."
He could but smile unmirthfully at her renunciations. His were privileges, it seemed, to her thinking, that any man might sigh for; though apparently they were to include a monastic seclusion from the world of sense, a virginity devoted, not to her passion—and for passion a man might be content to live or die—but to her sentimental fancies.
"Say," she pleaded, unsatisfied by his replies, which to such extortionate demands could be but vague, "say that I alone of all the women in the world can ever satisfy all your longings; that it would seem a degrading sacrilege to let any other woman come after me even in your thoughts! Tell me, even though I die, that my memory must keep you true."
He gazed at that for a day to get his breath, but the delay was all too long for hers.
"Write, write," she panted, on the morrow; "I cannot live unless I hear from you. Have you no feeling for a woman's dignity that you can give me over in this way to its scorn? I fling everything that I possess before you, and you find it not even worth acknowledgment."
What could he say? How could he answer her? Her blindness was sublime, detestable, ridiculous, as you were pleased to view it; but to blindness one could never refuse a hand.
Distressed by a necessity of which he had been the unwitting cause, Terence extended his. But his ignorance mitigated his foreboding; he still trusted to time.
Time, however, brought him but little comfort. If her letters became saner, it was only since he had thrown her insanity a sop. When they met a month later his difficulties were increased.
At first she had entreated him to win her respect by a display of repression.
He was to be as other men were not, to keep her staunch by an undreamed-of virtue. The lover's heart must animate to her perception only the unimpeachable kindness of the friend.
She had her wish, but had it, perhaps, in a perfection for which she was not prepared.
She seemed determined to leave no doubts as to his fortitude. She hung upon him so literally that he had to exert not moral fibre only to support her.
She drooped like a wreath about his shoulders, while he gazed, grim and ashamed, upon her hair.
But she drew no consolation from his strength. It was not strength, she told him, but indifference; she had asked for a sentry, and he had given her a statue.
She tried to soften the statue by every feminine artifice, even, at last, by kissing its irresponsive face.
He, invincibly simple, smiled at the wiles he thought were used to try him; and stiffened himself into the pose he had been convinced was her desire.
If it ever had been, she outlived it before long. Its end was advertised by an hysterical outbreak, which Terence never could recall without a shudder.
They were both, at the time, in town, where they met two or three times a week, and he had called to bring her some tickets.
She was sitting on a lounge in a remote corner of the room, and gave him her hand with blank indifference.
Unequal always to resolve her moods, he sustained a monologue from the fireplace on the trifles of the hour, until her persistent silence compelled him to ask its cause.
She replied listlessly, after some pressing, that it must be of no importance since he could ignore it.
She had merely been deceived in him, that was all: a common thing with a woman. He had proved himself to be just a man, like every other; and not the man of men she had supposed him.
It had amused him, no doubt, to win her love; now, it seemed, he was tired of it.
He had spoilt her life, he had destroyed her faith; but such things, of course, weren't worth mentioning: the great matter was, naturally, that a man should not be bored.
Now, she supposed, they might as well end the farce between them, so that he could amuse himself elsewhere. All she had lived for was over for ever, and she did not care what became of her.
She poured out the indictment to his bewildered ears in the level tones of utter apathy; but when it was done she flung herself violently across the head of the lounge in a tempest of passionate tears.
Terence, despairing of any further fitness or sanity in the affair, resigned himself to the situation with a sigh, and knelt beside her for an hour, until she appeared to draw from his caresses a renewed confidence in life.
He left her, sufficiently depressed himself, and expecting anything but a letter which reached him on the morrow by the earliest post.
It must have been written very shortly after his departure, which she had done her utmost to delay, yet it proclaimed her as too shamed by what had happened ever to meet him again, unless he felt himself strong enough to prevent such scenes in the future.
Feeling strong enough for nothing, he left her letter unanswered for a day, and received, on the next, eight pages of aggrieved reproaches for having forsaken her in the hour of her greatest need.
That was but the prelude to many meetings of as strange a kind. He never knew in what mood he should find her, nor in which she might wish to find him.
He believed her revulsions of propriety to be sincere, but felt she had no business with so many, especially since he offered her every assistance to avoid the need of them. He respected her for the first, pitied her for the second, endured the third in silence, and then began to hate them.