Whatever regret may have sounded in Terrington's admission, he did
nothing to mitigate the inconvenience of the boot he had thrust into
Sar.
He reorganized the service of spies which had been of such use to him
five years before; but the difficulties in picking up the threads,
which had then been complacent to his fingers, taught him more than was
told by those on which he could lay his hands.
The rise in the price of treachery, and the trivial details it could
profess to furnish, warned him not only of the nearness and wide-spread
intimation of an outbreak, but of a native confidence in its success.
He had sufficient belief in the extractive qualities of a bribe to
expect a few days' notice of the final explosion, when a knowledge of
the plot should have reached the more servile of his informants.
Meanwhile he could only listen to its developments in the dark.
On the surface there was no sign of trouble, save the difficulty of
obtaining audience of the Khan, and his disinclination, when cornered,
to talk treaties. There was much futile arrangement and re-arrangement
of durbar; Mir Khan refusing to discuss politics anywhere but in the
Palace, and Terrington being equally determined to provide them with
quite another carpet.
Meanwhile the most amiable appearances were preserved, and polo was
played three days a week on the ground beyond the Fort.
Within that gloomy building alterations of a significant kind were in
progress, but the only visible addition was a dado in art paper round
some of the walls.
The paper had been appropriated, from the medley of gifts collected for
the Khan by some humorist at headquarters, by Terrington, who said he
had a more pressing use for it.
Chantry, when he discovered that all the pressing was to be done on the
mud walls of the Fort, objected petulantly to this curtailment of his
stock of presents, which the Khan's policy of postponements had almost
exhausted.
Terrington replied drily that the paper was marked 'sanitary,' and that
the condition of the Fort when handed over to him was the reverse of
that: hence his use of it.
He did not point out further that a stick drawn along the dado in a
certain direction would have revealed a series of gaps in the mud work
behind it; and that if the point of the stick were used vigorously to
sound such gaps a lightly mortared stone would have fallen outwards
from each of them, and the Fort become a better ventilated and
loop-holed building.
Concealment was so essential to the undertaking that only Sir Colvin,
Afzul Singh, Terrington's trusted Subadar, and the sappers who did the
work were in the secret. Other noises had to be contrived to cover the
daily perforations, and only in darkness could the final drilling of
the walls be done: the outmost portion being replaced and the dado
extended before dawn.
Sir Colvin did not appreciate these preparations; but he could not
condemn them. They meant a winter's defence of Sar Fort against
overwhelming odds, and that was not a pretty thing to contemplate.
An uglier one, however, was to face those odds unprepared, and be
himself responsible for the improvidence.
So his consent was given, as an insurance on his reputation, but he
wished that Terrington's prevision had been more accommodating or less
acute.
So far, however, as the Commissioner was forced to admit, they had been
justified by results. Nothing had come of the Mission, and nothing
seemed to be on its way. More than a month had gone by in Sar, and
though the sun still filled its sheltered valley with a summer heat,
snow had fallen on the eastern passes; and, visibly from the hills
about it, the everlasting whiteness of the northern peaks was spreading
in frozen silence towards the plain.
Terrington had watched that whiteness, knowing what it meant, and, half
ashamed of himself, hoping what it meant.
It was for the falling of that icy portcullis, he felt, that Sar was
waiting: waiting till it closed across their chance of escape, across
their hope of rescue.
Then the gathering conspiracy would burst: burst, as it supposed, on
unprepared defenders; and the end would rest with him. It would be a
siege, whatever its outcome, as great as any that had lived in story,
and the man who saw it through would need no further fame.
He was a cavalryman; but this was his ideal of combat: a fight which
should test every quality of manhood; a struggle through months of
despairing vigilance with unconquerable hordes.
Yet though he saw in such a siege the rare chance of a lifetime, a
chance for which his life had waited, he tried with an astounding
probity to make it impossible.
"I believe," he told Sir Colvin on the question of secret
fortification, "I believe that we can hold Sar Fort for at least ten
weeks, if my plans are carried out; but, if I may say it to you, sir, I
think we have no business to try."
Asked his reason, he expressed the conviction that the game of military
glory in Sar wasn't worth the candle of men's lives which would be
burnt in an attempt to relieve it in mid-winter.
"Your word, then, is go?" asked the Commissioner.
"Yes, sir. Make the immediate discussion of the treaty the condition
of your remaining, and let the Khan realize how his refusal will be
understood.
This place can be wiped out cheaply enough next summer; but if our
chaps have to slam up here through the snow they'll lose two men for
every one they save."
"And how are we to go?" asked the other.
"Oh; by the Palári," replied the soldier. it "By the Palári!"
exclaimed Sir Colvin. "Why the snow's over it already."
"Yes, sir; but Gale is at this end of it in Rashát. What's to happen
to him if we creep out by the south?"
But the Commissioner shook his head, to Terrington's intense relief.
That last argument clinched his decision. The Government which put him
into the pickle must take him out of it. He was not going to fight his
way home with three hundred men through the snows of the Palári and
between the desolate precipices of Maristan, where once in ancient days
an army had melted like the spring water upon its courses. So
Terrington returned to his loopholes, and Sir Colvin to that merry
little messroom in the shade of the chenar where all the trifling rites
of home were observed with such an exacting deference, and the chances
of the morrow debated with a boy's disdain. The dinner table, however,
could show a feature which would have been unusual elsewhere, since a
woman sat in its seat of honour.
When Mrs. Chantry had made over her two best rooms for the use of the
Mission, its members had elected her to the presidency of their mess,
and despite the charming shyness with which she took the chair she had
converted it at once into a throne.
Most of her subjects would have welcomed the wildest folly on her
behalf, and not one would have missed without dismay the light
whiteness of her presence in the breakfast-room, or the lithe figure
with its girlish shoulders which rose every evening from the square
black chair at the head of the table and lifted a glass above its
golden head to pledge their memories to their Queen. It is possible
that, as they touched glasses against the one her white arm held across
the cloth, they vowed a more immediate homage than the toast
proclaimed; but then a soldier's homage has often so many vicarious
shades.
Of Terrington Mrs. Chantry saw far less than of the rest. He made no
occasions to meet her, and never offered himself as an escort for the
rides which he had not yet proscribed. She saw him at polo--and he was
worth seeing at polo--at dinner, and occasionally in the morning, when
she was in time to pour out his tea.
For the remainder of the day he was buried in the Fort. But she
learnt, chiefly through her husband, the part his counsel played in Sir
Colvin's decisions, especially when that was, as mostly, in direct
disagreement with Lewis Chantry's mind.
Of that mind his wife had never taken a too imposing measure, but she
espoused it now even when obviously at fault.
She used it to provide causes for a quarrel with Nevile Terrington, and
she despised it for starting her almost always in the wrong.
She would have been puzzled, perhaps, to give a reason for her enmity,
and might have said that it dated from the moment she had seen him.
But it had really an earlier origin--the moment when she expected, and
did not see him; and it was kept alive by his absolute indifference to
her beauty and her opinion.
Her supreme object was to show herself stronger than he, to thwart his
plans, to make him repent having dared to ignore her.
For he would not take her seriously enough to explain his intentions.
He treated her as a child; as though there were a world of things that
could not be put into speech for her. He was for ever filling up
spaces, where the matter was beyond her with the asterisks of a smile.
But while he was in Sar her efforts were of no avail.
Terrington could detect her secret influence in the sayings of all the
men about her, even in Sir Colvin's tentative suggestions; but beyond
creating a dull hostility to his plans and policy she could do nothing.
She tried to draw from him at mess some declaration that would irritate
the others, but Terrington, though apparently indifferent to their
irritations, only laughed at her attempts.
It was when, by a sudden intermission in the supplies on which he had
counted for provisioning the Fort, Terrington was obliged to leave Sar
in order to put personal persuasion on his agents in the country round,
that Rose Chantry saw her chance, and took it.
The decision she could most effect was, she saw instantly, that of the
Durbar.
Every one was chafing under the restrictions which Terrington had
imposed; every one was anxious to have the crisis over, and the future
settled one way or another. Aire's urgent representations had been
shelved by a harassed Viceroy in the fatuous hope of something turning
up to save expense and excuse his vacillations.
The eastern passes were already under snow, the southern would be white
with it in a fortnight longer. If a winter in Sar were to be avoided
something must be done at once, and, since no one but Terrington
anticipated hostilities, a winter in Sar was the last thing they wished.
Rose Chantry found, in consequence, ground sown ready to her hand: and
she fed it with a fertilizer which is always effective--a woman's smile
at man's unvalorous hesitations.
In this case, probably, it only precipitated the harvest; but
precipitation was essential.
On the third day of Terrington's absence the Durbar was proclaimed.