XIV.It was one thing to help fight the scourge with Mackenzie in the military hospital, crude as it was, where things were carried on with a certain nicety and regard to military discipline that was stronger than even the demoralizing dread of the hour; but it was another matter to fight it, and crush it, and stamp it out, alone, in the midst of half a hundred panic stricken natives, who knew neither military discipline nor paid proper attention to the precautionary measures of the disease.Trevelyan had never possessed the quality of conciliation; it had been either one side of the line or the other. He had always reduced things to their smallest denomination at once, with no intermediate measures. And the quality became now a practical and living thing, as he forced the natives to bow before him in obedience, and brought order out of chaos.It was not altogether the exact application of the military organization learned at Woolwich, or the inspiration of the rally he had dreamed of, that would fire his men, he told himself grimly, as he worked among these people, but it answered for it, and it brought them into subjection to his will.He held them in control, as the pilot holds in control the ship he steers, guiding it through the madness of the gale, and they never dreamed of mutiny, because they feared him more than they feared the cholera.And by and by when they saw that he held the scourge in check, his hand upon its throat, they fell down before him in all the pitifulness of ignorance and superstition, as before a being mightier than they had ever conceived of, worshiping him. But they were at his feet always.Mackenzie, shrewd and silent-tongued, took in the situation at a glance, when he rode over for an afternoon, a fortnight later, to see how Trevelyan was getting on."He's the biggest man I ever knew," he said to himself as he followed the orderly who was leading him to Trevelyan.He found Trevelyan stooping over the small rigid figure of a native baby, his hand still resting on the tiny wrist where the pulse had just stopped its slow beating.Mackenzie came in and stood on the other side of the child, and Trevelyan raised his head. He showed no surprise at Mackenzie being there. In his face was all the unutterableness of the horror; in his voice was all the passionate protest, all the crushing dread, all the grief, that he had never shown before."It—is—awful!"Mackenzie nodded."Yes," he said.XV.Three weeks later, when it seemed as though the battle had been won, Trevelyan got a hasty scrawl from Mackenzie.It had been carried by a man of the regiment, who had ridden the ten miles on a dead run, and now stood exhausted before Trevelyan, his face twitching with the fright born of the tidings he had brought.Trevelyan took the note in silence and he looked hard at the man's face before he opened the message. Then he bent his head and forced the paper open, still without comment."Eight cases broken out in barracks. If you can leave—come. Mackenzie."He crushed the note in his hand."My respects to Dr. Mackenzie," he said quietly, raising his head and meeting the eyes of the trooper, "and I will be with him to-night."He spent the morning in arranging matters and leaving orders with his chief helper, who was to remain for a time, more as a precautionary measure than for anything else, and then made his own scant preparations in haste to get to Mackenzie before nightfall.He had thought first of slipping away, fearful of what the knowledge of his going might bring, but the more he thought of it the more he put the idea from him. After all the truth was the wisest.He called all those of the half hundred natives together who had been spared of the scourge—most of whom he had fought death for, and he addressed them in Hindostanee. He spoke to them simply and briefly; he told them what they must do—not why they must do it, but simply because he ordered them to, and expected their obedience—relying on the worshipful fear with which they regarded him."If I hear of your disobeying me—and I shall hear it, for my ears are long and sharp—I shall come back and I will kill the dog who dared to disobey my commands, and you are to obey and do just what theSahibI leave here tells you to do—do you understand?"A low murmuring of assent greeted him, and one or two of the women held their babies up that they might look upon the greatSahibwho was leaving them for a time; who was wise enough to know ten miles off if anyone disobeyed him; who was strong enough to kill the dog who tried to disobey his great commands.And the murmuring of their voices followed him as he rode away from them later, and the echo of their "Sahib! Sahib! Sahib!" haunted him, not knowing that in the years that lay ahead, the native mothers would tell their babies of the greatness of the Sahib who once had come to them.The shadows, the children of the sunset, lay thick upon the road, over which he journeyed back to Mackenzie, and in the silence he began to think of England and of Scotland, and of Cary.He thought of them all then, in the pause that came between the struggle he had just passed through and the struggle that lay ahead, as he had not had the time or peace to think of them since he had left Patna. Nor did he try to force the thoughts from him as he had done on leaving Patna, but he went in search of them as a father goes in search of little truant children hiding in the dark, and brings them back and holds them close with caresses.He brought the vision of Mactier forth so, and he went over every familiar gesture, every tone of Mactier's voice he knew; he called up the mother-face of his aunt, the soft pressure of her hand; and he thought of his uncle and Maggie and Kenneth, and of Stewart—lingeringly—and of his father.And then he brought forth the picture plate, buried in the dark room of his soul, and he thought of her; and he thought, and thought of her! He held the dream picture up between him and the light of the dying day, and once he put out his hand slowly and it rested lightly in the air, but in his dream it rested on Cary's head. Once he raised his head suddenly and sharply, and he breathed quicker than his wont. The night shadows crept up and peered into his thin, lined face with the dark-circled eyes; and though he was alone with only the air touching him, in his dream his face was close to hers.And back of the dreams was the echo of the ocean on the crags. But the dreams and the echo faded as he came within sight of the military hospital, and the thoughts receded back and back into the darkness before the new necessity of the hour; but the truant children were not lost, only hiding from him, and peering at him from the shadows and waiting for him to come and look for them and take them home.He dismounted, hardly conscious of the greetings the men gave him as they crowded around him, and he went at once to Mackenzie, as an officer reporting for duty.Mackenzie looked at him sharply as he entered. The full beard he had grown had changed him, and would have hidden the loss of flesh and the haggard lines to any other than Mackenzie."You don't look fit to go on with the job, boy," he said concisely.Trevelyan laughed."That's absurd, don't you know? I'm all right.""It's more than you look—you're all pulled down!""You're dreaming! Tell me about the barracks!"And Mackenzie told him—briefly.All night he and Mackenzie and Clarke worked over the new cases, resting by turns, and in the morning two other men were brought in. One was the trooper who had borne the summons to Trevelyan.The cases developed slowly, and with an effort that had in it something of the supernatural, they kept it from spreading into the mow down of an epidemic. But the men were sick—sicker than any had yet been, and out of the proportion stricken, the mortality was frightful, and Death's twin brother, Fear, laid his heavy hand upon the district.The men were good, on the whole, as to precautionary measures, for they held Mackenzie and even Clarke in wholesome awe, but they regarded Trevelyan with something greater still. They were ashamed before him—ashamed to mention their fear, or even think it, as he came and went among them, silent, commanding, and unmoved by fear.Mackenzie or Clarke could not have spoken so to them—silently. They were at their own business. They were supposed and expected to meet disease and death, daily, hourly if necessary, and not be afraid. But Trevelyan was not a surgeon; he had come out to them to serve them in their extremity—voluntarily—without military command, and they grew to think of the scourge after a while as they would have looked upon a hostile tribe to be conquered—as an enemy to be vanquished for the Queen.And as though the lessening of their panic was the sign for the dying out of the scourge, the cholera cases decreased as the days wore themselves away.It was toward the end of the desperate fight that they had made that Mackenzie came in one day at dawn, to relieve Trevelyan's watch over the half dozen cases in his wing of the hospital. He noticed that Trevelyan looked oddly white, and that there was a drawn expression about his mouth and face."What is it," he asked. "Aren't you feeling well?""Why, yes; what made you ask?""You look——""It's the daylight and the sickly candle," Trevelyan answered shortly as he rose to leave. "McHennessy, here, has put in a night of it. See you later."Once outside in the narrow passage Trevelyan leaned up stupidly against the wall. His head was hurting him violently and was colder than the hand he pressed against it, and a sudden deadly nausea seized him. He stared hard at the wall opposite and made a movement as though to call Mackenzie. Then he drew back and waited. A numbness crept into his legs, and it seemed to him to deaden all his power. After awhile the seizure passed and he stumbled over to the apothecary's room, and he began to measure out the old prescription of the morphia and calomel and white sugar. What was the good of calling Mackenzie when Mackenzie could do nothing more for him than he could do for himself? Then he went into an empty room kept for emergency cases at the end of the building, and flung himself down.After awhile the deadly nausea returned and he sat up and crawled to his feet, and went back to the apothecary's room and measured out the prescription again—three hours was the limit between doses, and his watch said that the three hours had passed. He believed the watch had lied, and that it was thirty hours instead.Mackenzie opened the door and stood transfixed on the threshold. Trevelyan conscious of the movement turned and started violently."What are you doing?" Mackenzie's voice was terrible in its hardness.Trevelyan held up the scales with a trembling hand, and he made an odd sound in his throat that was intended for a laugh."Measuring morphia! What do you suppose?"Mackenzie came up close to him, and his horror-stricken eyes looked straight into Trevelyan's sunken ones."Who for?"Trevelyan was silent."Answer me!"Trevelyan shook his head piteously, and a ghastly pallor crept slowly up over his face and into the hollows of his temples and his cheeks."You're ill, and you didn't call me!""What was the good——"Trevelyan swayed forward. When he spoke again there was an apology in his hoarse voice because he was ill."It's the nausea," he said simply.XVI.Mackenzie went in search of Clarke."Drop everything and come with me," he said. "It's Trevelyan—Trevelyan's got the cholera."Clarke took a long breath. Then he called to two passing orderlies.Mackenzie led the three of them back to the apothecary's shop, as a soldier would have led a squad of men forward to meet an enemy, his face hard with the control he had put upon it, but it changed suddenly as they reached Trevelyan and picked him up and bore him down the hall. He allowed them to do so unresistingly, falling back into their arms a dead weight. They staggered under it. He made no comment until they reached the door of the surgeons' room. Then he shook his head."Not there," he said. "Take me in with the men.""But you'll be ever so much more comfortable here," said Clarke, still breathing quickly under the weight of his portion of the burden."You'd better let us take you in here, lad," said Mackenzie, bending over him. "You'll get well twice as quick and it's quieter, and the nausea will pass——""It's the cholera," said Trevelyan, in a clear calm voice. "Take me in with the men."XVII.All day Mackenzie sat by Trevelyan, scarcely leaving him, except to make his rounds; Clarke and the orderlies taking charge of the two small wards and the needs of those there. And all day Mackenzie sat stoically looking off into space or turning to feel Trevelyan's pulse or watch the change of his face. There was not a shadow of a change he did not watch and note. Trevelyan's great form lay motionless—deadened by morphia, the occasional twitching of the limbs and the heavy breathing, the only signs of life. Now and then, as the effect of the morphia lifted, he would turn his head restlessly and murmur incoherent things, or call for water, and Mackenzie would force a teaspoonful at a time of the cool liquid between the rigid lips.Once Trevelyan's hand went up with a spasmodic motion to his throat, and the movement pulled and tore aside the covering across his chest, and exposed to view the white scar on his shoulder. Mackenzie leaning over him to replace the covering, was attracted by the sight of the old wound, and he hesitated and leaned a little nearer, examining it.A sudden death-like quiet brooded over the ward, and the minutes lengthened and still Mackenzie leaned over the unconscious figure, his eyes fixed on the scar. By and by he looked at Trevelyan's gray and sunken and unconscious face, and a swift change passed over his own impenetrable features, and he drew the covering quickly over the scar, as though he were ashamed.Clarke came in and Mackenzie straightened himself and turned to meet him, his hand upon the covering that hid the scar. There was something defiant in the attitude.Clarke came up and stood on the other side of the bed."What do you think of it?" he asked."I don't want to think anything about it," Mackenzie answered shortly."But his chances?" asked Clarke after a little. "Has he got any show?""He's got a damned bad case," said Mackenzie, "and no strength to fight it with. I knew it would be just this way if he ever got it—he'd have itbad! There's nothing half way about him!"Clarke tapped his foot against the floor and looked down at it.."How he could have loved some woman," he said.Mackenzie turned his head slowly and looked at Trevelyan. Once he had seen a look in Trevelyan's eyes— When he spoke it was as if he were thinking aloud. "How he loved some woman!"Trevelyan moved restlessly and opened his eyes, and looked at Mackenzie and Clarke and then back to Mackenzie. There was nothing in his face that led them to suppose he had heard.Mackenzie leaned over him."How are you?""Deuced bad," Trevelyan said slowly, and then the nausea returned.The man in the next bed began to moan a little. Trevelyan turned to Mackenzie, a frown upon his face, as though he was trying to place the sound."What is it?" he asked. "What's that noise?""It's McHennessy—you'd better let us move you into our room."Trevelyan shook his head."I suppose it's a blamed silly notion, but I'd rather be with the men." And then he stretched out his cold hands suddenly and grasped Mackenzie's convulsively, "The pain," he said.Mackenzie looked up at Clarke and nodded to the question in the other's eyes.Mackenzie took out his handkerchief and wiped the great beads off Trevelyan's forehead. When Clarke returned with the morphia, the nausea had come again.Trevelyan waved Clarke aside."I don't want it," he whispered hoarsely. "I couldn't keep it down anyway, and—I—don't—want it!"And when he was not to be persuaded Mackenzie let him back slowly on the pillow.All night the nausea lasted, but in the early morning there came cessation for a time, and Mackenzie left Clarke with him, and went to snatch a bit of sleep.Clarke watched by him in silence—dumb with the terribleness of it all; dumb with his own powerlessness to help—and Trevelyan was grateful for the cessation and the silence.When the cessation came his thoughts went out to Cary, and they drew the memory of her face to him. It was in truth a dream of heaven—and real, untouched by the thralldom of the morphia.He was growing weaker—he could feel the ebbing of his strength—and he did not care. In the morning he had fought against it, as he had fought everything all his life—passionately, but now with the cessation and the coming of the dream face, he did not care.He clung to the vision of the dream though, fiercely, as though fearing it would escape him and be lost forever. He had loved her, and he loved her still!His love for her had been as a mountain that has been stripped in a storm of its fairest foliage; that has been wrecked by a great fire which has swept it of all its rarest beauty, leaving only the bareness of the boulders, but withstanding the wreck of the storm and the fire. So his love had stood and endured as a sample of the Eternal Handiwork—a basis of his life, as is love the basis of the life of the Everlasting.He was conscious of the clasp of Clarke's fingers on his wrist, and the sudden appearance of a frightened orderly with the intelligence that Burns, in the next ward, was worse, and would he come at once; and he was dimly conscious of Clarke's bending over him and of his telling him to go to Burns, but he still clung to the vision of the dream face. Desperately he clung to it, even when the blessed cessation suddenly ceased, and it seemed as though he was being engulfed in a great abyss of unspeakable agony, and he kept his thoughts upon it as a crusader would have kept his dying thoughts upon the unattainable quest.And then he became dimly conscious of a low moaning sound and he lay still trying, to place it, because Mackenzie was not there to tell him what it was, and he had forgotten what Mackenzie had said it was, but he still tried to concentrate his thoughts on the dream face that was growing faint and fainter. The effort was a complete failure, and the low moaning increased. He fixed it slowly as coming from the next bed. He turned his head toward it weakly. The incoherent ravings became a piteous and conscious cry for water.The gray dawn crept in slowly and up to the trooper's bed, and by its light Trevelyan could see him turning his head restlessly from side to side. Still the cry for water reached him.It did not seem to affect him much at first, or pierce the consciousness of pity, but it annoyed him, and it kept coming between him and the dream face he was struggling so desperately to hold. And then it struck on him suddenly like a blow and he awoke to the man's anguish and the man's need—how often he had answered to that need and cry before! He looked toward the farthest corner of the room where an orderly lay sleeping from exhaustion. The man was half sick anyway, from a recent attack of the scourge. He did not want to call him; but if he would only awaken—if he only would.He waited. There was no sound from the corner; there was no movement in the hall that would tell of Clarke's return, and the low cry went on. Since the day he had joined Mackenzie he had followed and responded to that cry as the soldier follows and responds to the first low notes of the bugle. He pushed himself over to the edge of the bed and tried to sit up but the motion increased his agony and he lay still. He wondered blindly if he could do it. Then he let himself roll over the side of the bed and his big frame fell with a dull thud on the rough boards of the floor. He lay there a second, but there was no movement from the corner. He pulled himself up, took half a dozen steps toward the water bucket in the near corner, and then the cramp came back again in his legs, and he fell forward, and began to creep toward it on his hands and knees. The dream face was fading and being swallowed up in a breaking crest of white sea foam, and there seemed to be nothing in the world but the man's cry and his own pain.He reached the bucket and he dipped in the glass that stood near and filled it, and then began his slow journey to the man's bed. By the deepening light in the east the man could see the great creeping figure approaching, and he drew back, afraid."It's only I, McHennessy. I've got some water—" the voice trailed off, but the trooper caught the word "water" and he struggled to a reclining position and waited. The figure moved so slowly and his throat was a burning sheet of flame! Why didn't he come faster—what was the matter that he didn't come faster; and McHennessy's blood-shot eyes were riveted on the slowly moving figure.Trevelyan reached him at length and pulled himself up with a supreme effort, with the glass balanced very carefully in his hand. He was striving—striving too—after that elusive dream face.He leaned over McHennessy with the water, and McHennessy with a sigh of ecstasy struggled up in his bed and leaned forward to touch his parched lips to the glass.Trevelyan brought it up nearer and his hand wavered. He controlled it with a great effort of will for a moment, and then the glass trembled and its contents were spilt over McHennessy, and the glass crashed into shivers as it fell to the floor beside the bed. Trevelyan flung out his arms suddenly, groping for the dream face that had gone.The orderly, awakened by the crash, started up and ran over to where Trevelyan lay on the floor by the side of McHennessy, who was swearing over the unexpected bath, and as he staggered beneath Trevelyan's weight, Mackenzie came quickly forward from the threshold of the door. Together they carried Trevelyan back to bed and Mackenzie silently drew the coverings over his rigid body and stood looking down at the livid lips and listening to the slow, feeble breathing. Once he picked up the hand that lay on the outside of the covering and examined it, and then laid it back in its resting place.[image]"Trevelyan lay on the floor."Clarke who had heard the glass break, hurried in from the adjoining ward. Mackenzie looked up as he entered."Collapse?" asked Clarke briefly.Mackenzie did not seem to hear him."Bring the salt—it's just a chance," he said.XVIII.The light deepened in the east and the sunrise crept into the ward of the hospital and turned its search light curiously on the group in the furthest corner of the ward, and on the still figure on the bed. All morning the sunlight lingered around there as though it wanted to help Mackenzie in his fight, and impart into the chill of the rigid figure, some of its own warmth, and when the afternoon shadows came and drew it off, it retreated lingeringly, loath to say "good-night."The shadows deepened and the quietness of midnight fell over the weary Station and the outlying cholera hospital. Mackenzie continued to sit by the bed.The quietness outside crept in to meet the silence of the ward, and the night lamp cast strange shadows on the wall, at which Mackenzie stared. Once or twice he got up and visited the other beds and leaned over the men. Most were pulling through and were sleeping. McHennessy was drowsy with the morphia. Then Mackenzie would go back and sit down again by Trevelyan's bed. At midnight, Clarke, with eyes heavy with sleep, came in. He did not speak but he looked down at Trevelyan and then up questionally to Mackenzie, and at the syringe and the salt lying near by."It didn't work," said Mackenzie. "If you'll listen to the lungs you'll know why—pneumonia.""You'd better go and rest a bit. I'll stay—I won't leave him," said Clarke, blinking at the light and wondering at the quietness of his own voice.Mackenzie looked hard at the flickering night lamp."No," he said slowly. "I guess not."After Clarke had gone back to their room, the surgeon riveted his eyes on Trevelyan's sunken face, and once he put his hand out quickly and pressed it over the bloodshot eyes, but the lids opened again and would not remain closed. The slow labor of the feeble breathing went on. The almost imperceptible rise and fall of the great chest fascinated Mackenzie, and he found himself watching for it feverishly, hoping and yet dreading for it to cease.While it was still dark he rose and went over to the window and looked out fixedly at the impenetrable pall of blackness that lay over the Station and the hospital. It seemed as though the heaviness of the blackness was over all the world.By and by the night pall lifted a little, and a dull grayness crept into the heavens and rested on the station. He could dimly distinguish the outline of some of the military buildings. He turned away and went over to the lamp that was smoking and lowered it. From the trooper's bed came a low moaning.He paused to speak to him and then he went back to Trevelyan, and looked down at him, his eyes fixed on the great chest, watching for its slow rise and fall. Somehow he could not see the rise and fall—they did not seem to be there. He bent over him quickly."Trevelyan!" he called sharply.The trooper in the next bed ceased moaning and raised himself on his arm painfully, and looked over to where Mackenzie was standing.Mackenzie knelt down suddenly on one knee, and his hand passed rapidly from Trevelyan's forehead to his pulse. The trooper in the next bed began to moan again.Mackenzie laid his ear down quickly to the heart, an expectant look upon his face. Then he raised it slowly and bit his lip and stared hard through the window to where the barracks were defined against the paling grayness of the sky.XIX.The sunshine of the early summer lay heavy like a cloth of gold across the rolling Scottish country, and Stewart turned away abruptly from its brightness and stared down at the floor of the railway carriage.All night he had lain awake, grasping fiercely at the bit of paper that had summoned him to the office of the Secretary for India, while his brain with equal fierceness refused to accept the tidings which had met him there.He was dumbly grateful, however, for the friendship and the kindly interest that had led the Secretary, for his father's sake, to send for him, and for the time that busy man had taken, and the consideration that had shielded him from seeing the latest cholera reports pasted up at the Office or in the columns of the press.Some day he would thank the Secretary as he should. Just now it seemed to him his brain had become a burning blank, and that the fire was as unquenchable as it was mighty, forbidding thought. Once, twice, a dozen times he tried to picture Trevelyan as he had known him, but Trevelyan's face would not come. He could not recall one line of it—he could not recall his voice—his slightest gesture; and he vaguely wondered if he were going mad, and when the rumble of the iron wheels would cease.He was conscious of being grateful for the stopping of the noise, when he descended from the carriage, in the early light of the new day, to make his last connection with the local.The local was late some two hours—it seemed to him twenty—and a feverish impatience came upon him to reach home and have it over with. The new faces around him were strange and looked at him curiously. There was a lean Scotch collie that sniffed at his heels and tried to make friends with him, and a small Scotch laddie, rosy-cheeked and freckled, who regarded him wonderingly from a safe distance, his forefinger in his mouth. Stewart noticed it was clean; he supposed it was too early for it to be covered with the conventional coat of dirt. The boy looked a little sleepy too. He wondered why he felt so wide awake himself. The collie licked at his boot. He neither encouraged nor rejected the familiarity. He simply ignored it. The morning sun was growing warm, and a bright patch of it touched the dress of the child. * * *The local came around the curve and he got into the carriage, mechanically picking out his usual seat near the window. Force of habit is strong. There was a bit of rolling hillside and an old kirk down by a little stream he always looked out for.He was alone and he was glad. The train jerked and backed a little and then fairly started on its run. It passed the hillside and the old kirk at the foot of the slope, and the bit of water that for a moment flashed the brightness of its sunlit surface upon his vision, and was gone. For the first time the landscape failed to please. Beyond the old kirk was another slope—a slope of heather, just putting forth its early pink; and though he could not see it he knew that just where the old road curved up to the kirk, the bracken grew.Then the reaction came and his inertia broke and the burning blank became a sheet of memory. Trevelyan had loved the bracken and the heather so. As a laddie he had played among them and hidden himself—short kilts and all—beneath their bloom. Once he had gotten lost, and they had vainly searched for him, but Stewart slipping away unnoticed, and led by unerring instinct, had found him fast asleep down there—his head pillowed on the bracken and a faded scrap of heather in his small moist hand. And now the bracken might bloom on, and the sun might shine upon it by day and the stars smile down upon the heather slope by night, and the mist rest upon it, turning it to a mystical sheet of grayness and of silver—but Trevelyan would never walk across the slope again, and Stewart leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes.All night the train had moved so slowly and he had dumbly longed that the iron wheels would hasten that he might reach home soon; and now that the home station in Aberdeen was nearly in sight, a sudden sickness seized him and he prayed for a delay.He had wired ahead for Sandy to meet him with the trap instead of the cart in which he usually came for the mail. He had sent the message to Sandy instead of the family, and had bidden the Scotchman be silent about his unexpected return from London.It was a comfort, he reflected, that Sandy could be trusted to hold his tongue. He felt he could not bear to have them meet him at the station. He could not tell them there, neither could he play a part so long—until they should reach home. He was trusting to that seven mile drive to collect himself. He hoped Maggie would not come with Sandy—as she sometimes did—to get the mail, especially when Cameron was away. Well, he would trust to Cameron's being there, and to Sandy now—He remembered the mail and the papers would arrive with him—he was glad for that in a dull way—if he could only reach home before the papers, he had thought before leaving Waterloo Station.His father was in Glasgow with Kenneth. He could not spare them. There would be the Little Madre to be told, and Maggie and Tom Cameron, and Mactier—poor old Mactier—and Cary—he wiped the moisture from his mouth—and Trevelyan's father lately returned from the far East—God help him. God help them all!The local stopped. Through the window he could see Sandy waiting for him with the trap on the other side of the track, quieting the restless horses; Maggie had not come.He got out—how he never afterwards remembered—and he stored his Gladstone safely away beneath the back seat, waited for the mail bag to be put in, and then climbed up with a nod to the red headed Scotchman and a "how are they all?" mechanically asked.The old Scotchman looked at him curiously, as the child and the collie had done, and he was distinctly annoyed at being stared at.The blacks, with their heads turned homeward, made good progress over the road—too good, Stewart thought, and once he sharply bade Sandy draw them in. Then as if ashamed of his impatience he inquired as to Sandy's daughter, who had been ill. Sandy answered the question briefly, realizing that talking came amiss to-day, and then gave his attention to checking the rapid pace of the blacks, who were eager to get home.The morning sun beat down upon them, but it seemed to Stewart that he was turned to ice and that he would never feel any warmth again. The station lay five miles or more beyond the point of home, and when he repassed the slope of heather and the old kirk road where the bracken grew, he turned his eyes away. It seemed to him he could never look upon or touch either the bracken or the heather again.And the old road! Once they used to travel it together; they had traveled it in their earliest babyhood and again that dark night when Trevelyan had been brought from Argyll to make his home with them—a little, lonely, motherless lad of ten. They had crossed the old bridge so often; they had crossed it together that last time—the last time—and he had never known! He held on fast to the back of the seat in front, and moved his head a little—restlessly—as though it hurt. Henceforth there would be no more "togethers."Sandy cleared his throat."There's naething wrong, I hope, sir?" he asked a little timidly, but unable to bear the silence longer.There was no answer. They were passing the heather slope and speech was not. And then Sandy, with an instinct not unusual in his race turned half around and blurted out:"'Tis bad news ye've had from India, sir?"Stewart looked past Sandy to the big fir that marked the boundary line of home, and nodded; and then he suddenly dropped his eyes and ran his finger, shaking as though with palsy, along the patent leather strip that bound back the corduroy of the seat."Mr. Trevelyan's ill," asserted Sandy, unwilling to acknowledge the thought that came to him and which he knew was true. "You're going to bring him back to Aberdeen—" Sandy hesitated.Stewart looked away."Mr. Trevelyan will not come back to Aberdeen, Sandy—" he broke off.The blacks trotted briskly over the road and the warm sunshine rested on the meadows and brightened everything but the big dark fir ahead. Somewhere in the copse near by a bird was singing.The long home avenue was deserted except for McGuire, who was carefully clipping in his precise way the border of the walks, and McGuire leaned upon his shears, wondering why the young master had passed him with no sign of greeting.There was no one else around. The house stood big and still in the sunshine, and the deserted terraces sloped away—like a vast piece of greenest velvet. Some of the windows were open, and from one of the upstairs casements a white curtain was fluttering in the breeze. It was his mother's room. A restful quietness brooded over everything.There was no one in the hall, flanked with its weapons and armor and paintings, and no sound from the breakfast room. Breakfast, he supposed, was long over. He had had none himself, but he was not conscious of the lack.Someone was coming down the stairs. Stewart paused, a sudden heat replacing the chill that had possessed him until now. The sound came nearer and he recognized the halting step of Trevelyan's father—Trevelyan's father, who still bore that scar from Inkerman.XX.Trevelyan's father stopped when he reached the foot of the stairs."Why, hello, boy, when did you get back? Thought you were in London for a fortnight.""I thought so, too, sir, but you see, I—""Ho-ho, that's it, is it?" His uncle laughed. "Well, I can't blame you. She isn't here, though—out with Maggie for a walk." He looked up quizzically into his nephew's face, and then he looked away abruptly. Robert, too, loved the girl."Is she?" asked Stewart absently, and he turned toward the library, conscious that in the morning it was deserted, and that he could tell him there without fear of interruption. "The fact is, sir—"Trevelyan's father stopped short and looked his nephew over."What is it? What's the trouble?" he asked concisely."Who—with me, sir? Nonsense; I'm all right.""Was it Sir Archibald or that bit of diplomatic work?" The old man smiled grimly."Sir Archibald! I'm dismissed from his books long ago, sir. The diplomatic work promises well. By the way, have you heard the latest from Essex—" He sat down easily on the arm of a big leather chair and lounged across it; his face in shadow—. "It's reported that Davidson is going to raise that dead and buried claim again.""'A fool and his money—'" said the old officer, and sat down."Where's the Little Madre?""Out listening to Margie's woes. If her rheumatism don't carry her off soon I'll be inclined to do the job myself. Your mother is turning into her slave!" said his uncle testily."Margie's rheumatism isn't any worse than Ann Grafton's stiff knee or Sam's lame back," replied Stewart, swinging one foot against the side of the chair. "Mother always has been at the mercy of the tenants."How was he to begin, he wondered.He mechanically commenced to pull off his gloves."See here, John—" he glanced up quickly at Trevelyan's father sitting in a black walnut chair carved a hundred years ago, his face shining out weather-beaten and grim from the dark background, and his voice more decided than Stewart had ever heard it—"Why did Robert leave the army?"A glove dropped and lay at Stewart's feet unnoticed. He moved restlessly."Why shouldn't he? He had served his sub-lieutenancy. He got his commission—""To resign it. Exactly! Why?""He never liked the Army, sir; it was always the Navy with him from the first—""Is he with the Navy now?" The old officer tapped the floor impatiently with his heavy stick. "Why is he in India doing an orderly's work instead of in the line?""Did you ever know Robert to stick to anything very long, sir?""Only one," said the old Briton shortly, and he thought of Cary. "You haven't answered me."Stewart rose, and his tone was final."Indeed, sir, it is not for me to say."Trevelyan's father clasped his hands over the knob of his stick, rested his chin on them and looked up at Stewart from under his shaggy brows—curiously."Well—well, since you won't, you won't, I suppose! I'll have to wait until Robert comes back—"Stewart wheeled abruptly and went over to the east window."After all, the boy is his own master," Trevelyan's father said. "He's whimsical and headstrong, too—" he broke off—"Everything was all straight, though—his getting out, I mean?" The deep eyes peered anxiously from the old officer's weather-beaten face.Stewart remained at the window, looking at the stretch of lawn. For the first time since his interview at the Secretary's, his voice was broken."You need not be ashamed of Rob."The old Briton drew a deep breath and he laughed a little—"After all, nothing else matters! I was sure of it!" and then again, "I—was—sure—of—it!"Stewart began mechanically to count the number of rose bushes at the end of the terrace, and he made a great effort to steady his voice."By the way, this last idea of Robert's—this cholera business—is a risky thing. Do you ever feel anxious, sir?""The boy's foolhardy, but he's got sense—" the Briton frowned."But even sense sometimes——"The room was still. A bit of summer sunlight sifted through the oriel window. From the distance crept in the murmur of water breaking on the sand. McGuire was busy at the rose bushes near the terrace and the decided "click" of his shears and the soft music of the sea, were the only sounds that broke the quiet of the room."John!"Trevelyan's father rose and stood rigid by the old carved chair. Young Stewart turned and leaned against the woodwork. He grew afraid and trembled. He could not look upon that face."Robert!That is why you have come back?"He nodded.The sunlight still sifted through the windows and played fitfully around the walnut carvings of the room and touched for a brief moment a bronze paper weight of the Dying Gaul. Someone standing in the open casement window at the south, stirred a little, and then Cary came swiftly down the length of the long room. A bit of heather from the armful she had gathered on the slope slipped from the bunch. The rest she threw upon the table as she passed it, and it lay there—its first, faint pink shining out against the black walnut. She went and stood by Trevelyan's father, resting her hand upon his arm, and she looked up into his face."I left Maggie—I came ahead—I overheard—" she began disjointedly, "Robert—the cholera—Robert—?" and then as neither of the men spoke, she cried, "Oh, sir, indeed it may be a mistake—sometimes, you know the names—"Trevelyan's father looked down at the girl, and into her eyes full of unshed tears, and on the small white hand on his arm he placed his own—the one that had held the sabre at Inkerman. It was an old hand, thin and vividly veined, and it trembled."The report was signed by Mackenzie," said Stewart at last."There is some mistake—theremustbe—the letters—" cried Cary."We will have to wait for the letters, child." Trevelyan's father turned away.Stewart came up to her."It was at the India Office yesterday—the Secretary—after all—" he broke off.She looked from one to the other, but she still stood by Trevelyan's father. Suddenly she sat down in the high backed chair he had occupied, clinging to his hand, her eyes on his face. Stewart went back to the window."But think what he did——"Trevelyan's father looked down at her again and his face twitched."He was always a brave laddie," he said, and his face was wet with tears.Cary raised the hand she was holding and pressed it to her cheek, and she held it there—brown and thin and heavily veined—against the delicate texture, and caressed it in the way that women have."He was a great soul. I always knew it! I—always—knew—it—" she told them brokenly."He was a Briton," said the old officer of the Empire. "I didn't always understand him—I blamed him for doing an orderly's work. I'm proud of him—but if it had been anything but the cholera—I saw it once myself in Bombay; I ran away from it—" he raised his head, "anything butthat! But—I'm proud of him!"Stewart still stood by the oriel window leaning against his arm flung over his head, and he was crying—hardly and bitterly as a man cries. The stillness of the outside world increased. The sun crept into the corner of the room."I can't quite take it in—" said the old man slowly, looking past the girl to a far-off field of thistle and staring at the purplish bloom. "It's hard to think of Robert—gone!"And then:"I can't think of the rest—the details—" he clenched his hands fiercely, "the pain—the thirst—" and his eyes came back to Cary. "There! There! There's something about it all that we can't understand, I fancy, but there is the honor—that thing which does not perish with the using!"He turned abruptly, and when Cary, half fearful for him, would have followed, he motioned her away, and went out alone on the back terrace.Stewart had not moved from the window, and Cary went and stood beside him, gravely looking out at the sunlight shifting on the lawn. She did not say anything, but as though conscious that they were alone, he spoke, his face still hidden on his arm."I did it," he said at last in a broken voice of confession. "Ididthink to help him best by making him get away from the old crowd and the regiment—but it was because I thought of the Service, too—and I judgedhim——!"She waited, and she did not speak, but she slipped one of her hands into the pocket of his tweed coat and held on to it."I broke his life—he lovedmebetter than that—" he began."Do you call a life that endedso—broken?"He raised his face from his arm and looked at her."No—no—I didn't mean that—but think of my judging him! All last night it came back to me—I thought I was going stark mad." And he brushed away the tears clumsily."It all hurtsso! But, by and by—" she looked straight out of the oriel window, and she spoke disjointedly, and somehow she thought of western Scotland, and his sword. "I knew when we got those letters from Argyll—when I got my letter—Rob wasn't coming back to us."Stewart drew her to him."Oh! Cary, tell me that it doesn't mean to you all—all that it might have done! Lassie—tell me——"She smiled a little."You are foolish," she told him. "You know I love you," and then looking into his eyes—"It is only you."He hid his mouth against the soft coil of her hair."Last night, I was almost jealous of the dead," he whispered, "and then when I passed the heather fields to-day—and the bracken—" his voice broke."I know," she said simply. "It is always the bracken and the heather—and Rob—isn't it?"From the south window the sun poured into the room and lighted up the heavy carvings of black walnut. The bit of heather still lay upon the floor and withered there. A silent linnet perched itself upon the window sill.Somewhere from beyond the turn in the wooded drive, Maggie was coming home, singing:"Some talk of Alexander,And some of Hercules,Of Hector and Lysander,And such great names as these!"A man's heavy halting step came from the back terrace. In the stillness they could hear him mount the stairs."But of all the world's great heroes—There's none that—"Somewhere upstairs a door closed.
XIV.
It was one thing to help fight the scourge with Mackenzie in the military hospital, crude as it was, where things were carried on with a certain nicety and regard to military discipline that was stronger than even the demoralizing dread of the hour; but it was another matter to fight it, and crush it, and stamp it out, alone, in the midst of half a hundred panic stricken natives, who knew neither military discipline nor paid proper attention to the precautionary measures of the disease.
Trevelyan had never possessed the quality of conciliation; it had been either one side of the line or the other. He had always reduced things to their smallest denomination at once, with no intermediate measures. And the quality became now a practical and living thing, as he forced the natives to bow before him in obedience, and brought order out of chaos.
It was not altogether the exact application of the military organization learned at Woolwich, or the inspiration of the rally he had dreamed of, that would fire his men, he told himself grimly, as he worked among these people, but it answered for it, and it brought them into subjection to his will.
He held them in control, as the pilot holds in control the ship he steers, guiding it through the madness of the gale, and they never dreamed of mutiny, because they feared him more than they feared the cholera.
And by and by when they saw that he held the scourge in check, his hand upon its throat, they fell down before him in all the pitifulness of ignorance and superstition, as before a being mightier than they had ever conceived of, worshiping him. But they were at his feet always.
Mackenzie, shrewd and silent-tongued, took in the situation at a glance, when he rode over for an afternoon, a fortnight later, to see how Trevelyan was getting on.
"He's the biggest man I ever knew," he said to himself as he followed the orderly who was leading him to Trevelyan.
He found Trevelyan stooping over the small rigid figure of a native baby, his hand still resting on the tiny wrist where the pulse had just stopped its slow beating.
Mackenzie came in and stood on the other side of the child, and Trevelyan raised his head. He showed no surprise at Mackenzie being there. In his face was all the unutterableness of the horror; in his voice was all the passionate protest, all the crushing dread, all the grief, that he had never shown before.
"It—is—awful!"
Mackenzie nodded.
"Yes," he said.
XV.
Three weeks later, when it seemed as though the battle had been won, Trevelyan got a hasty scrawl from Mackenzie.
It had been carried by a man of the regiment, who had ridden the ten miles on a dead run, and now stood exhausted before Trevelyan, his face twitching with the fright born of the tidings he had brought.
Trevelyan took the note in silence and he looked hard at the man's face before he opened the message. Then he bent his head and forced the paper open, still without comment.
"Eight cases broken out in barracks. If you can leave—come. Mackenzie."
He crushed the note in his hand.
"My respects to Dr. Mackenzie," he said quietly, raising his head and meeting the eyes of the trooper, "and I will be with him to-night."
He spent the morning in arranging matters and leaving orders with his chief helper, who was to remain for a time, more as a precautionary measure than for anything else, and then made his own scant preparations in haste to get to Mackenzie before nightfall.
He had thought first of slipping away, fearful of what the knowledge of his going might bring, but the more he thought of it the more he put the idea from him. After all the truth was the wisest.
He called all those of the half hundred natives together who had been spared of the scourge—most of whom he had fought death for, and he addressed them in Hindostanee. He spoke to them simply and briefly; he told them what they must do—not why they must do it, but simply because he ordered them to, and expected their obedience—relying on the worshipful fear with which they regarded him.
"If I hear of your disobeying me—and I shall hear it, for my ears are long and sharp—I shall come back and I will kill the dog who dared to disobey my commands, and you are to obey and do just what theSahibI leave here tells you to do—do you understand?"
A low murmuring of assent greeted him, and one or two of the women held their babies up that they might look upon the greatSahibwho was leaving them for a time; who was wise enough to know ten miles off if anyone disobeyed him; who was strong enough to kill the dog who tried to disobey his great commands.
And the murmuring of their voices followed him as he rode away from them later, and the echo of their "Sahib! Sahib! Sahib!" haunted him, not knowing that in the years that lay ahead, the native mothers would tell their babies of the greatness of the Sahib who once had come to them.
The shadows, the children of the sunset, lay thick upon the road, over which he journeyed back to Mackenzie, and in the silence he began to think of England and of Scotland, and of Cary.
He thought of them all then, in the pause that came between the struggle he had just passed through and the struggle that lay ahead, as he had not had the time or peace to think of them since he had left Patna. Nor did he try to force the thoughts from him as he had done on leaving Patna, but he went in search of them as a father goes in search of little truant children hiding in the dark, and brings them back and holds them close with caresses.
He brought the vision of Mactier forth so, and he went over every familiar gesture, every tone of Mactier's voice he knew; he called up the mother-face of his aunt, the soft pressure of her hand; and he thought of his uncle and Maggie and Kenneth, and of Stewart—lingeringly—and of his father.
And then he brought forth the picture plate, buried in the dark room of his soul, and he thought of her; and he thought, and thought of her! He held the dream picture up between him and the light of the dying day, and once he put out his hand slowly and it rested lightly in the air, but in his dream it rested on Cary's head. Once he raised his head suddenly and sharply, and he breathed quicker than his wont. The night shadows crept up and peered into his thin, lined face with the dark-circled eyes; and though he was alone with only the air touching him, in his dream his face was close to hers.
And back of the dreams was the echo of the ocean on the crags. But the dreams and the echo faded as he came within sight of the military hospital, and the thoughts receded back and back into the darkness before the new necessity of the hour; but the truant children were not lost, only hiding from him, and peering at him from the shadows and waiting for him to come and look for them and take them home.
He dismounted, hardly conscious of the greetings the men gave him as they crowded around him, and he went at once to Mackenzie, as an officer reporting for duty.
Mackenzie looked at him sharply as he entered. The full beard he had grown had changed him, and would have hidden the loss of flesh and the haggard lines to any other than Mackenzie.
"You don't look fit to go on with the job, boy," he said concisely.
Trevelyan laughed.
"That's absurd, don't you know? I'm all right."
"It's more than you look—you're all pulled down!"
"You're dreaming! Tell me about the barracks!"
And Mackenzie told him—briefly.
All night he and Mackenzie and Clarke worked over the new cases, resting by turns, and in the morning two other men were brought in. One was the trooper who had borne the summons to Trevelyan.
The cases developed slowly, and with an effort that had in it something of the supernatural, they kept it from spreading into the mow down of an epidemic. But the men were sick—sicker than any had yet been, and out of the proportion stricken, the mortality was frightful, and Death's twin brother, Fear, laid his heavy hand upon the district.
The men were good, on the whole, as to precautionary measures, for they held Mackenzie and even Clarke in wholesome awe, but they regarded Trevelyan with something greater still. They were ashamed before him—ashamed to mention their fear, or even think it, as he came and went among them, silent, commanding, and unmoved by fear.
Mackenzie or Clarke could not have spoken so to them—silently. They were at their own business. They were supposed and expected to meet disease and death, daily, hourly if necessary, and not be afraid. But Trevelyan was not a surgeon; he had come out to them to serve them in their extremity—voluntarily—without military command, and they grew to think of the scourge after a while as they would have looked upon a hostile tribe to be conquered—as an enemy to be vanquished for the Queen.
And as though the lessening of their panic was the sign for the dying out of the scourge, the cholera cases decreased as the days wore themselves away.
It was toward the end of the desperate fight that they had made that Mackenzie came in one day at dawn, to relieve Trevelyan's watch over the half dozen cases in his wing of the hospital. He noticed that Trevelyan looked oddly white, and that there was a drawn expression about his mouth and face.
"What is it," he asked. "Aren't you feeling well?"
"Why, yes; what made you ask?"
"You look——"
"It's the daylight and the sickly candle," Trevelyan answered shortly as he rose to leave. "McHennessy, here, has put in a night of it. See you later."
Once outside in the narrow passage Trevelyan leaned up stupidly against the wall. His head was hurting him violently and was colder than the hand he pressed against it, and a sudden deadly nausea seized him. He stared hard at the wall opposite and made a movement as though to call Mackenzie. Then he drew back and waited. A numbness crept into his legs, and it seemed to him to deaden all his power. After awhile the seizure passed and he stumbled over to the apothecary's room, and he began to measure out the old prescription of the morphia and calomel and white sugar. What was the good of calling Mackenzie when Mackenzie could do nothing more for him than he could do for himself? Then he went into an empty room kept for emergency cases at the end of the building, and flung himself down.
After awhile the deadly nausea returned and he sat up and crawled to his feet, and went back to the apothecary's room and measured out the prescription again—three hours was the limit between doses, and his watch said that the three hours had passed. He believed the watch had lied, and that it was thirty hours instead.
Mackenzie opened the door and stood transfixed on the threshold. Trevelyan conscious of the movement turned and started violently.
"What are you doing?" Mackenzie's voice was terrible in its hardness.
Trevelyan held up the scales with a trembling hand, and he made an odd sound in his throat that was intended for a laugh.
"Measuring morphia! What do you suppose?"
Mackenzie came up close to him, and his horror-stricken eyes looked straight into Trevelyan's sunken ones.
"Who for?"
Trevelyan was silent.
"Answer me!"
Trevelyan shook his head piteously, and a ghastly pallor crept slowly up over his face and into the hollows of his temples and his cheeks.
"You're ill, and you didn't call me!"
"What was the good——"
Trevelyan swayed forward. When he spoke again there was an apology in his hoarse voice because he was ill.
"It's the nausea," he said simply.
XVI.
Mackenzie went in search of Clarke.
"Drop everything and come with me," he said. "It's Trevelyan—Trevelyan's got the cholera."
Clarke took a long breath. Then he called to two passing orderlies.
Mackenzie led the three of them back to the apothecary's shop, as a soldier would have led a squad of men forward to meet an enemy, his face hard with the control he had put upon it, but it changed suddenly as they reached Trevelyan and picked him up and bore him down the hall. He allowed them to do so unresistingly, falling back into their arms a dead weight. They staggered under it. He made no comment until they reached the door of the surgeons' room. Then he shook his head.
"Not there," he said. "Take me in with the men."
"But you'll be ever so much more comfortable here," said Clarke, still breathing quickly under the weight of his portion of the burden.
"You'd better let us take you in here, lad," said Mackenzie, bending over him. "You'll get well twice as quick and it's quieter, and the nausea will pass——"
"It's the cholera," said Trevelyan, in a clear calm voice. "Take me in with the men."
XVII.
All day Mackenzie sat by Trevelyan, scarcely leaving him, except to make his rounds; Clarke and the orderlies taking charge of the two small wards and the needs of those there. And all day Mackenzie sat stoically looking off into space or turning to feel Trevelyan's pulse or watch the change of his face. There was not a shadow of a change he did not watch and note. Trevelyan's great form lay motionless—deadened by morphia, the occasional twitching of the limbs and the heavy breathing, the only signs of life. Now and then, as the effect of the morphia lifted, he would turn his head restlessly and murmur incoherent things, or call for water, and Mackenzie would force a teaspoonful at a time of the cool liquid between the rigid lips.
Once Trevelyan's hand went up with a spasmodic motion to his throat, and the movement pulled and tore aside the covering across his chest, and exposed to view the white scar on his shoulder. Mackenzie leaning over him to replace the covering, was attracted by the sight of the old wound, and he hesitated and leaned a little nearer, examining it.
A sudden death-like quiet brooded over the ward, and the minutes lengthened and still Mackenzie leaned over the unconscious figure, his eyes fixed on the scar. By and by he looked at Trevelyan's gray and sunken and unconscious face, and a swift change passed over his own impenetrable features, and he drew the covering quickly over the scar, as though he were ashamed.
Clarke came in and Mackenzie straightened himself and turned to meet him, his hand upon the covering that hid the scar. There was something defiant in the attitude.
Clarke came up and stood on the other side of the bed.
"What do you think of it?" he asked.
"I don't want to think anything about it," Mackenzie answered shortly.
"But his chances?" asked Clarke after a little. "Has he got any show?"
"He's got a damned bad case," said Mackenzie, "and no strength to fight it with. I knew it would be just this way if he ever got it—he'd have itbad! There's nothing half way about him!"
Clarke tapped his foot against the floor and looked down at it..
"How he could have loved some woman," he said.
Mackenzie turned his head slowly and looked at Trevelyan. Once he had seen a look in Trevelyan's eyes— When he spoke it was as if he were thinking aloud. "How he loved some woman!"
Trevelyan moved restlessly and opened his eyes, and looked at Mackenzie and Clarke and then back to Mackenzie. There was nothing in his face that led them to suppose he had heard.
Mackenzie leaned over him.
"How are you?"
"Deuced bad," Trevelyan said slowly, and then the nausea returned.
The man in the next bed began to moan a little. Trevelyan turned to Mackenzie, a frown upon his face, as though he was trying to place the sound.
"What is it?" he asked. "What's that noise?"
"It's McHennessy—you'd better let us move you into our room."
Trevelyan shook his head.
"I suppose it's a blamed silly notion, but I'd rather be with the men." And then he stretched out his cold hands suddenly and grasped Mackenzie's convulsively, "The pain," he said.
Mackenzie looked up at Clarke and nodded to the question in the other's eyes.
Mackenzie took out his handkerchief and wiped the great beads off Trevelyan's forehead. When Clarke returned with the morphia, the nausea had come again.
Trevelyan waved Clarke aside.
"I don't want it," he whispered hoarsely. "I couldn't keep it down anyway, and—I—don't—want it!"
And when he was not to be persuaded Mackenzie let him back slowly on the pillow.
All night the nausea lasted, but in the early morning there came cessation for a time, and Mackenzie left Clarke with him, and went to snatch a bit of sleep.
Clarke watched by him in silence—dumb with the terribleness of it all; dumb with his own powerlessness to help—and Trevelyan was grateful for the cessation and the silence.
When the cessation came his thoughts went out to Cary, and they drew the memory of her face to him. It was in truth a dream of heaven—and real, untouched by the thralldom of the morphia.
He was growing weaker—he could feel the ebbing of his strength—and he did not care. In the morning he had fought against it, as he had fought everything all his life—passionately, but now with the cessation and the coming of the dream face, he did not care.
He clung to the vision of the dream though, fiercely, as though fearing it would escape him and be lost forever. He had loved her, and he loved her still!
His love for her had been as a mountain that has been stripped in a storm of its fairest foliage; that has been wrecked by a great fire which has swept it of all its rarest beauty, leaving only the bareness of the boulders, but withstanding the wreck of the storm and the fire. So his love had stood and endured as a sample of the Eternal Handiwork—a basis of his life, as is love the basis of the life of the Everlasting.
He was conscious of the clasp of Clarke's fingers on his wrist, and the sudden appearance of a frightened orderly with the intelligence that Burns, in the next ward, was worse, and would he come at once; and he was dimly conscious of Clarke's bending over him and of his telling him to go to Burns, but he still clung to the vision of the dream face. Desperately he clung to it, even when the blessed cessation suddenly ceased, and it seemed as though he was being engulfed in a great abyss of unspeakable agony, and he kept his thoughts upon it as a crusader would have kept his dying thoughts upon the unattainable quest.
And then he became dimly conscious of a low moaning sound and he lay still trying, to place it, because Mackenzie was not there to tell him what it was, and he had forgotten what Mackenzie had said it was, but he still tried to concentrate his thoughts on the dream face that was growing faint and fainter. The effort was a complete failure, and the low moaning increased. He fixed it slowly as coming from the next bed. He turned his head toward it weakly. The incoherent ravings became a piteous and conscious cry for water.
The gray dawn crept in slowly and up to the trooper's bed, and by its light Trevelyan could see him turning his head restlessly from side to side. Still the cry for water reached him.
It did not seem to affect him much at first, or pierce the consciousness of pity, but it annoyed him, and it kept coming between him and the dream face he was struggling so desperately to hold. And then it struck on him suddenly like a blow and he awoke to the man's anguish and the man's need—how often he had answered to that need and cry before! He looked toward the farthest corner of the room where an orderly lay sleeping from exhaustion. The man was half sick anyway, from a recent attack of the scourge. He did not want to call him; but if he would only awaken—if he only would.
He waited. There was no sound from the corner; there was no movement in the hall that would tell of Clarke's return, and the low cry went on. Since the day he had joined Mackenzie he had followed and responded to that cry as the soldier follows and responds to the first low notes of the bugle. He pushed himself over to the edge of the bed and tried to sit up but the motion increased his agony and he lay still. He wondered blindly if he could do it. Then he let himself roll over the side of the bed and his big frame fell with a dull thud on the rough boards of the floor. He lay there a second, but there was no movement from the corner. He pulled himself up, took half a dozen steps toward the water bucket in the near corner, and then the cramp came back again in his legs, and he fell forward, and began to creep toward it on his hands and knees. The dream face was fading and being swallowed up in a breaking crest of white sea foam, and there seemed to be nothing in the world but the man's cry and his own pain.
He reached the bucket and he dipped in the glass that stood near and filled it, and then began his slow journey to the man's bed. By the deepening light in the east the man could see the great creeping figure approaching, and he drew back, afraid.
"It's only I, McHennessy. I've got some water—" the voice trailed off, but the trooper caught the word "water" and he struggled to a reclining position and waited. The figure moved so slowly and his throat was a burning sheet of flame! Why didn't he come faster—what was the matter that he didn't come faster; and McHennessy's blood-shot eyes were riveted on the slowly moving figure.
Trevelyan reached him at length and pulled himself up with a supreme effort, with the glass balanced very carefully in his hand. He was striving—striving too—after that elusive dream face.
He leaned over McHennessy with the water, and McHennessy with a sigh of ecstasy struggled up in his bed and leaned forward to touch his parched lips to the glass.
Trevelyan brought it up nearer and his hand wavered. He controlled it with a great effort of will for a moment, and then the glass trembled and its contents were spilt over McHennessy, and the glass crashed into shivers as it fell to the floor beside the bed. Trevelyan flung out his arms suddenly, groping for the dream face that had gone.
The orderly, awakened by the crash, started up and ran over to where Trevelyan lay on the floor by the side of McHennessy, who was swearing over the unexpected bath, and as he staggered beneath Trevelyan's weight, Mackenzie came quickly forward from the threshold of the door. Together they carried Trevelyan back to bed and Mackenzie silently drew the coverings over his rigid body and stood looking down at the livid lips and listening to the slow, feeble breathing. Once he picked up the hand that lay on the outside of the covering and examined it, and then laid it back in its resting place.
[image]"Trevelyan lay on the floor."
[image]
[image]
"Trevelyan lay on the floor."
Clarke who had heard the glass break, hurried in from the adjoining ward. Mackenzie looked up as he entered.
"Collapse?" asked Clarke briefly.
Mackenzie did not seem to hear him.
"Bring the salt—it's just a chance," he said.
XVIII.
The light deepened in the east and the sunrise crept into the ward of the hospital and turned its search light curiously on the group in the furthest corner of the ward, and on the still figure on the bed. All morning the sunlight lingered around there as though it wanted to help Mackenzie in his fight, and impart into the chill of the rigid figure, some of its own warmth, and when the afternoon shadows came and drew it off, it retreated lingeringly, loath to say "good-night."
The shadows deepened and the quietness of midnight fell over the weary Station and the outlying cholera hospital. Mackenzie continued to sit by the bed.
The quietness outside crept in to meet the silence of the ward, and the night lamp cast strange shadows on the wall, at which Mackenzie stared. Once or twice he got up and visited the other beds and leaned over the men. Most were pulling through and were sleeping. McHennessy was drowsy with the morphia. Then Mackenzie would go back and sit down again by Trevelyan's bed. At midnight, Clarke, with eyes heavy with sleep, came in. He did not speak but he looked down at Trevelyan and then up questionally to Mackenzie, and at the syringe and the salt lying near by.
"It didn't work," said Mackenzie. "If you'll listen to the lungs you'll know why—pneumonia."
"You'd better go and rest a bit. I'll stay—I won't leave him," said Clarke, blinking at the light and wondering at the quietness of his own voice.
Mackenzie looked hard at the flickering night lamp.
"No," he said slowly. "I guess not."
After Clarke had gone back to their room, the surgeon riveted his eyes on Trevelyan's sunken face, and once he put his hand out quickly and pressed it over the bloodshot eyes, but the lids opened again and would not remain closed. The slow labor of the feeble breathing went on. The almost imperceptible rise and fall of the great chest fascinated Mackenzie, and he found himself watching for it feverishly, hoping and yet dreading for it to cease.
While it was still dark he rose and went over to the window and looked out fixedly at the impenetrable pall of blackness that lay over the Station and the hospital. It seemed as though the heaviness of the blackness was over all the world.
By and by the night pall lifted a little, and a dull grayness crept into the heavens and rested on the station. He could dimly distinguish the outline of some of the military buildings. He turned away and went over to the lamp that was smoking and lowered it. From the trooper's bed came a low moaning.
He paused to speak to him and then he went back to Trevelyan, and looked down at him, his eyes fixed on the great chest, watching for its slow rise and fall. Somehow he could not see the rise and fall—they did not seem to be there. He bent over him quickly.
"Trevelyan!" he called sharply.
The trooper in the next bed ceased moaning and raised himself on his arm painfully, and looked over to where Mackenzie was standing.
Mackenzie knelt down suddenly on one knee, and his hand passed rapidly from Trevelyan's forehead to his pulse. The trooper in the next bed began to moan again.
Mackenzie laid his ear down quickly to the heart, an expectant look upon his face. Then he raised it slowly and bit his lip and stared hard through the window to where the barracks were defined against the paling grayness of the sky.
XIX.
The sunshine of the early summer lay heavy like a cloth of gold across the rolling Scottish country, and Stewart turned away abruptly from its brightness and stared down at the floor of the railway carriage.
All night he had lain awake, grasping fiercely at the bit of paper that had summoned him to the office of the Secretary for India, while his brain with equal fierceness refused to accept the tidings which had met him there.
He was dumbly grateful, however, for the friendship and the kindly interest that had led the Secretary, for his father's sake, to send for him, and for the time that busy man had taken, and the consideration that had shielded him from seeing the latest cholera reports pasted up at the Office or in the columns of the press.
Some day he would thank the Secretary as he should. Just now it seemed to him his brain had become a burning blank, and that the fire was as unquenchable as it was mighty, forbidding thought. Once, twice, a dozen times he tried to picture Trevelyan as he had known him, but Trevelyan's face would not come. He could not recall one line of it—he could not recall his voice—his slightest gesture; and he vaguely wondered if he were going mad, and when the rumble of the iron wheels would cease.
He was conscious of being grateful for the stopping of the noise, when he descended from the carriage, in the early light of the new day, to make his last connection with the local.
The local was late some two hours—it seemed to him twenty—and a feverish impatience came upon him to reach home and have it over with. The new faces around him were strange and looked at him curiously. There was a lean Scotch collie that sniffed at his heels and tried to make friends with him, and a small Scotch laddie, rosy-cheeked and freckled, who regarded him wonderingly from a safe distance, his forefinger in his mouth. Stewart noticed it was clean; he supposed it was too early for it to be covered with the conventional coat of dirt. The boy looked a little sleepy too. He wondered why he felt so wide awake himself. The collie licked at his boot. He neither encouraged nor rejected the familiarity. He simply ignored it. The morning sun was growing warm, and a bright patch of it touched the dress of the child. * * *
The local came around the curve and he got into the carriage, mechanically picking out his usual seat near the window. Force of habit is strong. There was a bit of rolling hillside and an old kirk down by a little stream he always looked out for.
He was alone and he was glad. The train jerked and backed a little and then fairly started on its run. It passed the hillside and the old kirk at the foot of the slope, and the bit of water that for a moment flashed the brightness of its sunlit surface upon his vision, and was gone. For the first time the landscape failed to please. Beyond the old kirk was another slope—a slope of heather, just putting forth its early pink; and though he could not see it he knew that just where the old road curved up to the kirk, the bracken grew.
Then the reaction came and his inertia broke and the burning blank became a sheet of memory. Trevelyan had loved the bracken and the heather so. As a laddie he had played among them and hidden himself—short kilts and all—beneath their bloom. Once he had gotten lost, and they had vainly searched for him, but Stewart slipping away unnoticed, and led by unerring instinct, had found him fast asleep down there—his head pillowed on the bracken and a faded scrap of heather in his small moist hand. And now the bracken might bloom on, and the sun might shine upon it by day and the stars smile down upon the heather slope by night, and the mist rest upon it, turning it to a mystical sheet of grayness and of silver—but Trevelyan would never walk across the slope again, and Stewart leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes.
All night the train had moved so slowly and he had dumbly longed that the iron wheels would hasten that he might reach home soon; and now that the home station in Aberdeen was nearly in sight, a sudden sickness seized him and he prayed for a delay.
He had wired ahead for Sandy to meet him with the trap instead of the cart in which he usually came for the mail. He had sent the message to Sandy instead of the family, and had bidden the Scotchman be silent about his unexpected return from London.
It was a comfort, he reflected, that Sandy could be trusted to hold his tongue. He felt he could not bear to have them meet him at the station. He could not tell them there, neither could he play a part so long—until they should reach home. He was trusting to that seven mile drive to collect himself. He hoped Maggie would not come with Sandy—as she sometimes did—to get the mail, especially when Cameron was away. Well, he would trust to Cameron's being there, and to Sandy now—
He remembered the mail and the papers would arrive with him—he was glad for that in a dull way—if he could only reach home before the papers, he had thought before leaving Waterloo Station.
His father was in Glasgow with Kenneth. He could not spare them. There would be the Little Madre to be told, and Maggie and Tom Cameron, and Mactier—poor old Mactier—and Cary—he wiped the moisture from his mouth—and Trevelyan's father lately returned from the far East—God help him. God help them all!
The local stopped. Through the window he could see Sandy waiting for him with the trap on the other side of the track, quieting the restless horses; Maggie had not come.
He got out—how he never afterwards remembered—and he stored his Gladstone safely away beneath the back seat, waited for the mail bag to be put in, and then climbed up with a nod to the red headed Scotchman and a "how are they all?" mechanically asked.
The old Scotchman looked at him curiously, as the child and the collie had done, and he was distinctly annoyed at being stared at.
The blacks, with their heads turned homeward, made good progress over the road—too good, Stewart thought, and once he sharply bade Sandy draw them in. Then as if ashamed of his impatience he inquired as to Sandy's daughter, who had been ill. Sandy answered the question briefly, realizing that talking came amiss to-day, and then gave his attention to checking the rapid pace of the blacks, who were eager to get home.
The morning sun beat down upon them, but it seemed to Stewart that he was turned to ice and that he would never feel any warmth again. The station lay five miles or more beyond the point of home, and when he repassed the slope of heather and the old kirk road where the bracken grew, he turned his eyes away. It seemed to him he could never look upon or touch either the bracken or the heather again.
And the old road! Once they used to travel it together; they had traveled it in their earliest babyhood and again that dark night when Trevelyan had been brought from Argyll to make his home with them—a little, lonely, motherless lad of ten. They had crossed the old bridge so often; they had crossed it together that last time—the last time—and he had never known! He held on fast to the back of the seat in front, and moved his head a little—restlessly—as though it hurt. Henceforth there would be no more "togethers."
Sandy cleared his throat.
"There's naething wrong, I hope, sir?" he asked a little timidly, but unable to bear the silence longer.
There was no answer. They were passing the heather slope and speech was not. And then Sandy, with an instinct not unusual in his race turned half around and blurted out:
"'Tis bad news ye've had from India, sir?"
Stewart looked past Sandy to the big fir that marked the boundary line of home, and nodded; and then he suddenly dropped his eyes and ran his finger, shaking as though with palsy, along the patent leather strip that bound back the corduroy of the seat.
"Mr. Trevelyan's ill," asserted Sandy, unwilling to acknowledge the thought that came to him and which he knew was true. "You're going to bring him back to Aberdeen—" Sandy hesitated.
Stewart looked away.
"Mr. Trevelyan will not come back to Aberdeen, Sandy—" he broke off.
The blacks trotted briskly over the road and the warm sunshine rested on the meadows and brightened everything but the big dark fir ahead. Somewhere in the copse near by a bird was singing.
The long home avenue was deserted except for McGuire, who was carefully clipping in his precise way the border of the walks, and McGuire leaned upon his shears, wondering why the young master had passed him with no sign of greeting.
There was no one else around. The house stood big and still in the sunshine, and the deserted terraces sloped away—like a vast piece of greenest velvet. Some of the windows were open, and from one of the upstairs casements a white curtain was fluttering in the breeze. It was his mother's room. A restful quietness brooded over everything.
There was no one in the hall, flanked with its weapons and armor and paintings, and no sound from the breakfast room. Breakfast, he supposed, was long over. He had had none himself, but he was not conscious of the lack.
Someone was coming down the stairs. Stewart paused, a sudden heat replacing the chill that had possessed him until now. The sound came nearer and he recognized the halting step of Trevelyan's father—Trevelyan's father, who still bore that scar from Inkerman.
XX.
Trevelyan's father stopped when he reached the foot of the stairs.
"Why, hello, boy, when did you get back? Thought you were in London for a fortnight."
"I thought so, too, sir, but you see, I—"
"Ho-ho, that's it, is it?" His uncle laughed. "Well, I can't blame you. She isn't here, though—out with Maggie for a walk." He looked up quizzically into his nephew's face, and then he looked away abruptly. Robert, too, loved the girl.
"Is she?" asked Stewart absently, and he turned toward the library, conscious that in the morning it was deserted, and that he could tell him there without fear of interruption. "The fact is, sir—"
Trevelyan's father stopped short and looked his nephew over.
"What is it? What's the trouble?" he asked concisely.
"Who—with me, sir? Nonsense; I'm all right."
"Was it Sir Archibald or that bit of diplomatic work?" The old man smiled grimly.
"Sir Archibald! I'm dismissed from his books long ago, sir. The diplomatic work promises well. By the way, have you heard the latest from Essex—" He sat down easily on the arm of a big leather chair and lounged across it; his face in shadow—. "It's reported that Davidson is going to raise that dead and buried claim again."
"'A fool and his money—'" said the old officer, and sat down.
"Where's the Little Madre?"
"Out listening to Margie's woes. If her rheumatism don't carry her off soon I'll be inclined to do the job myself. Your mother is turning into her slave!" said his uncle testily.
"Margie's rheumatism isn't any worse than Ann Grafton's stiff knee or Sam's lame back," replied Stewart, swinging one foot against the side of the chair. "Mother always has been at the mercy of the tenants."
How was he to begin, he wondered.
He mechanically commenced to pull off his gloves.
"See here, John—" he glanced up quickly at Trevelyan's father sitting in a black walnut chair carved a hundred years ago, his face shining out weather-beaten and grim from the dark background, and his voice more decided than Stewart had ever heard it—"Why did Robert leave the army?"
A glove dropped and lay at Stewart's feet unnoticed. He moved restlessly.
"Why shouldn't he? He had served his sub-lieutenancy. He got his commission—"
"To resign it. Exactly! Why?"
"He never liked the Army, sir; it was always the Navy with him from the first—"
"Is he with the Navy now?" The old officer tapped the floor impatiently with his heavy stick. "Why is he in India doing an orderly's work instead of in the line?"
"Did you ever know Robert to stick to anything very long, sir?"
"Only one," said the old Briton shortly, and he thought of Cary. "You haven't answered me."
Stewart rose, and his tone was final.
"Indeed, sir, it is not for me to say."
Trevelyan's father clasped his hands over the knob of his stick, rested his chin on them and looked up at Stewart from under his shaggy brows—curiously.
"Well—well, since you won't, you won't, I suppose! I'll have to wait until Robert comes back—"
Stewart wheeled abruptly and went over to the east window.
"After all, the boy is his own master," Trevelyan's father said. "He's whimsical and headstrong, too—" he broke off—"Everything was all straight, though—his getting out, I mean?" The deep eyes peered anxiously from the old officer's weather-beaten face.
Stewart remained at the window, looking at the stretch of lawn. For the first time since his interview at the Secretary's, his voice was broken.
"You need not be ashamed of Rob."
The old Briton drew a deep breath and he laughed a little—"After all, nothing else matters! I was sure of it!" and then again, "I—was—sure—of—it!"
Stewart began mechanically to count the number of rose bushes at the end of the terrace, and he made a great effort to steady his voice.
"By the way, this last idea of Robert's—this cholera business—is a risky thing. Do you ever feel anxious, sir?"
"The boy's foolhardy, but he's got sense—" the Briton frowned.
"But even sense sometimes——"
The room was still. A bit of summer sunlight sifted through the oriel window. From the distance crept in the murmur of water breaking on the sand. McGuire was busy at the rose bushes near the terrace and the decided "click" of his shears and the soft music of the sea, were the only sounds that broke the quiet of the room.
"John!"
Trevelyan's father rose and stood rigid by the old carved chair. Young Stewart turned and leaned against the woodwork. He grew afraid and trembled. He could not look upon that face.
"Robert!That is why you have come back?"
He nodded.
The sunlight still sifted through the windows and played fitfully around the walnut carvings of the room and touched for a brief moment a bronze paper weight of the Dying Gaul. Someone standing in the open casement window at the south, stirred a little, and then Cary came swiftly down the length of the long room. A bit of heather from the armful she had gathered on the slope slipped from the bunch. The rest she threw upon the table as she passed it, and it lay there—its first, faint pink shining out against the black walnut. She went and stood by Trevelyan's father, resting her hand upon his arm, and she looked up into his face.
"I left Maggie—I came ahead—I overheard—" she began disjointedly, "Robert—the cholera—Robert—?" and then as neither of the men spoke, she cried, "Oh, sir, indeed it may be a mistake—sometimes, you know the names—"
Trevelyan's father looked down at the girl, and into her eyes full of unshed tears, and on the small white hand on his arm he placed his own—the one that had held the sabre at Inkerman. It was an old hand, thin and vividly veined, and it trembled.
"The report was signed by Mackenzie," said Stewart at last.
"There is some mistake—theremustbe—the letters—" cried Cary.
"We will have to wait for the letters, child." Trevelyan's father turned away.
Stewart came up to her.
"It was at the India Office yesterday—the Secretary—after all—" he broke off.
She looked from one to the other, but she still stood by Trevelyan's father. Suddenly she sat down in the high backed chair he had occupied, clinging to his hand, her eyes on his face. Stewart went back to the window.
"But think what he did——"
Trevelyan's father looked down at her again and his face twitched.
"He was always a brave laddie," he said, and his face was wet with tears.
Cary raised the hand she was holding and pressed it to her cheek, and she held it there—brown and thin and heavily veined—against the delicate texture, and caressed it in the way that women have.
"He was a great soul. I always knew it! I—always—knew—it—" she told them brokenly.
"He was a Briton," said the old officer of the Empire. "I didn't always understand him—I blamed him for doing an orderly's work. I'm proud of him—but if it had been anything but the cholera—I saw it once myself in Bombay; I ran away from it—" he raised his head, "anything butthat! But—I'm proud of him!"
Stewart still stood by the oriel window leaning against his arm flung over his head, and he was crying—hardly and bitterly as a man cries. The stillness of the outside world increased. The sun crept into the corner of the room.
"I can't quite take it in—" said the old man slowly, looking past the girl to a far-off field of thistle and staring at the purplish bloom. "It's hard to think of Robert—gone!"
And then:
"I can't think of the rest—the details—" he clenched his hands fiercely, "the pain—the thirst—" and his eyes came back to Cary. "There! There! There's something about it all that we can't understand, I fancy, but there is the honor—that thing which does not perish with the using!"
He turned abruptly, and when Cary, half fearful for him, would have followed, he motioned her away, and went out alone on the back terrace.
Stewart had not moved from the window, and Cary went and stood beside him, gravely looking out at the sunlight shifting on the lawn. She did not say anything, but as though conscious that they were alone, he spoke, his face still hidden on his arm.
"I did it," he said at last in a broken voice of confession. "Ididthink to help him best by making him get away from the old crowd and the regiment—but it was because I thought of the Service, too—and I judgedhim——!"
She waited, and she did not speak, but she slipped one of her hands into the pocket of his tweed coat and held on to it.
"I broke his life—he lovedmebetter than that—" he began.
"Do you call a life that endedso—broken?"
He raised his face from his arm and looked at her.
"No—no—I didn't mean that—but think of my judging him! All last night it came back to me—I thought I was going stark mad." And he brushed away the tears clumsily.
"It all hurtsso! But, by and by—" she looked straight out of the oriel window, and she spoke disjointedly, and somehow she thought of western Scotland, and his sword. "I knew when we got those letters from Argyll—when I got my letter—Rob wasn't coming back to us."
Stewart drew her to him.
"Oh! Cary, tell me that it doesn't mean to you all—all that it might have done! Lassie—tell me——"
She smiled a little.
"You are foolish," she told him. "You know I love you," and then looking into his eyes—"It is only you."
He hid his mouth against the soft coil of her hair.
"Last night, I was almost jealous of the dead," he whispered, "and then when I passed the heather fields to-day—and the bracken—" his voice broke.
"I know," she said simply. "It is always the bracken and the heather—and Rob—isn't it?"
From the south window the sun poured into the room and lighted up the heavy carvings of black walnut. The bit of heather still lay upon the floor and withered there. A silent linnet perched itself upon the window sill.
Somewhere from beyond the turn in the wooded drive, Maggie was coming home, singing:
"Some talk of Alexander,And some of Hercules,Of Hector and Lysander,And such great names as these!"
"Some talk of Alexander,And some of Hercules,Of Hector and Lysander,And such great names as these!"
"Some talk of Alexander,
And some of Hercules,
And some of Hercules,
Of Hector and Lysander,
And such great names as these!"
And such great names as these!"
A man's heavy halting step came from the back terrace. In the stillness they could hear him mount the stairs.
"But of all the world's great heroes—There's none that—"
"But of all the world's great heroes—There's none that—"
"But of all the world's great heroes—
There's none that—"
There's none that—"
Somewhere upstairs a door closed.