Terrington brought back his men with an undiminished precaution, Mir
Khan's affability merely increasing his distrust, and Afzul Singh, his
equal in subtlety and in knowledge of the foe, had prepared a sally
should the force require assistance in getting out of the Bazaar. Mir
Khan, however, to his own everlasting regret, held his hand, so that
the little expedition returned without a shot fired, and the gates of
the Fort were shut and barred behind it. Afzul Singh had been already
entrusted with the duty of putting every alien out of the Fort, but to
prevent more securely the escape of information, the guards were
strengthened, and sentries patrolled the entire front of the Fort with
orders to shoot any man attempting to enter or leave it before dawn.
When the men were dismissed Terrington called Walcot and Dore into the
women's durbar hall and sent for Hussain Shah and Afzul Singh, who were
the two senior native officers.
"I should like to break the news to Mrs. Chantry if I may," said Walcot
in the doorway.
"The news?" enquired Terrington.
"Of her husband's death," Walcot explained.
Terrington's face showed a certain blankness of apprehension. He had
forgotten that there was any one in the Fort, whose hopes or fears
could be affected by the confirmation obtained of that morning's
tragedy.
"Oh, certainly," he said.
The room was a long gloomy one on the ground floor, used by Langford
partly as an office, partly as a store. Bales and boxes still filled
two of its corners, and the space in front of them was littered with
Sir Colvin's and the Chantrys' belongings, which were being removed
from the Residency with ostentation. One dark window in the further
wall lent what dim light the room had, and the table at which
Terrington seated himself was drawn somewhat towards it.
He was writing when the two native officers entered, and he assigned to
them the two seats on his right, with the grave silent courtesy with
which the East had coloured so curiously his English manner. Dore,
nervously tired by the excitement of the morning, had dropped limply on
to a bale of clothing, and lit a cigarette, but the two Sikhs sat erect
and impassive beside the table. Clones came in to requisition some
stores, and reported Langford to be insensible and sinking.
"If you can spare a few moments you might spend them here," said
Terrington.
The doctor nodded, and sat down on a packing-case beside Dore, rising
again at once as Mrs. Chantry, followed by Walcot, entered the room.
She was wearing still the frock of creamy lace in which she was to have
watched the polo that afternoon. Her face looked listless and white
and faded above it like a broken flower. Her eyes sought Terrington's
in the dim room with a sort of frightened submissiveness.
"May I come in?" she said.
"Of course," he answered, getting out of his chair to hand it to her;
but Walcot had already drawn forward a seat of Sari rush from the
relics of the Residency, and she dropped into it limply, with a nod of
acknowledgment to Terrington, amid all the crushed and huddled
fragments of her own lost little home. Walcot sat down on a box beside
her. A tiny jade god slid down the pile of rugs and bowls and
cushions, and lay at her feet with a severed arm. He had been for
years the very dearest of her household treasures, and now to find him
maimed and friendless moved in her a despondent misery which she had
not felt at her husband's death. She hid the little broken body in the
hollow of her hand, and sat there, her head bent over it, shaking with
sobs. It was the very smallness of the grief that brought her tears.
Terrington blotted the notes he had written and laid down his pen. He
made no sort of preamble: for anything in his manner the occasion might
have been the most ordinary in the world.
"I wish," he said, "to explain my plans. Some of us may not come
through the next few weeks, and I don't want those who do to be saddled
with my mistakes. So I'll enter any protest, to cover you in case I'm
not with you at the finish. We leave Sar to-night."
Even the two dark impassive faces on his right reflected the
unexpectedness of his announcement, and Walcot half rose to his feet.
"Abandon the Fort?" he exclaimed.
"Abandon the Fort, and everything we cannot carry, and retire by the
Palári upon Rashát," said Terrington quietly.
"But I understood, if you'll excuse me," continued Walcot, trying to
control his excitement, "that all the defences of the Fort which we've
been at for the last month were your idea."
"They were," said Terrington.
"Have you changed your mind then?" asked the other sharply.
"No," said Terrington slowly, "but I've changed my position. I've only
so far had to decide how to make the Fort defensible if it had to be
defended."
"Yes, but!" Walcot objected, "the clearing of the Residency, the
blowing down of these trees; all that has taken place since! What's
been the object of that if you didn't mean to stay?"
"In war," said Terrington quietly, "it's sometimes as well to keep your
intentions from the enemy."
"Did Sir Colvin mean us to stay here, sir?" enquired Dore.
"Yes," said Terrington. "Sir Colvin intended to hold out in Sar if
anything went wrong till a relieving force could get up here from
Sampur."
"You absolutely disagree with him, then?" Walcot rapped out.
Terrington looked at him thoughtfully.
"I have another point of view," he said.
"And what's that?" snapped the other.
"He was a political officer and I am a soldier," said Terrington simply.
Dore turned his shoulder upon Walcot, with a wrinkle of annoyance at
his carping note.
"Don't you think we could hold Sar, sir?" he asked with boyish
eagerness for a stand-up fight.
"Yes," said Terrington, kindling sympathetically at the thought of the
fight he too had longed for, "I think we just could, though it might be
a near thing. I've decided to clear out," he went on, addressing the
others, "because the value of being penned up here doesn't impress me
politically, and because digging us out of this in mid-winter would
mean a horrible waste of life. There are only a few hundred of us to
be wiped out at the worst, but it might take thousands of the men who
came to save us. These little sieges are often very costly things."
"I shouldn't think our retirement will be very popular at home," Clones
suggested.
"I don't suppose it will," said Terrington; "at home they're rather
fond of a siege; it makes the paper more interesting."
"And how about the intentions of the Government, Colonel," Clones
continued in his reasonable way; "I suppose you were sent up here to
carry them out."
"No doubt," said Terrington with his grave smile, "but without being
told what its intentions were. Consequently one rather seems to be
here to make intentions for the Government, and I'm very possibly
making them all wrong. But that's their fault for not having sent a
better man."
"There's one point, Terrington, you don't seem to have considered,"
Walcot interjected; "that you've got to take a woman over passes which
even the natives won't cross at this time of year."
"I haven't considered it for a moment," said Terrington shortly.
Walcot's face curdled with anger.
"That's hardly been the habit of Englishmen hitherto out here," he
exclaimed.
"I dare say not," said Terrington with dry indifference.
Rose Chantry, with her hand still closed about the little broken god in
her lap, looked up at him through the tears that hung across her eyes.
Beyond the cool darkness of the entrance door, against the far wall of
the blazing courtyard she could see the row of charpoys with their
burden of dead men, mere rolls of sallow dungari cloth, waiting till
the grave being dug beside the Residency gate should be wide enough to
hold them. It was the most dreadful moment of her life, when she
needed above all to be petted and comforted into a sense of her
importance, but the man who should have done it was indifferent even to
her safety. She had already begun to cheer herself with the thought of
a siege; the delicacy of her position; the solicitous homage of all the
men; her cheerful and inspiring effect upon them; the excitement in
England so intensified by the presence of a woman among the besieged;
the accounts of her in the papers, made more touching by her loss; and
then the thrill of the relief--she took the relief for granted--the
sound of the guns, the fight through the streets of Sar, the cheers of
the British troops, the ardent congratulations, the soft abandonment of
that moment at the end of the suspense, and herself the one woman in a
British army. And the coming home after such an experience; the woman
of the moment, every one wanting to meet her; perhaps a command from
the Queen.
All her dream was shattered by Terrington's implacable decree. She
looked at him with despairing hate. She thought of the reckless
sacrifices Englishmen had made for women during the Mutiny, and hated
him the more. She felt sure that she could never live through the
snows of those passes about which she had heard such awful stories.
The cold would kill her; the cold always shrivelled her up; and she had
nothing to wear, nothing warmer than was wanted for an Indian winter.
And that very morning, only a few hours back, as the party started for
the Durbar, she had exulted in her triumph over him, she whose folly
had given everything into his hand!
What ages it seemed since Lewis had swung buoyantly into his saddle,
and Sir Colvin, ruddy and cheery, had waved her an "au revoir." Now
they were rolls of yellow dungari lying out there in the sun.
In her absorption of self-pity she scarcely heard Captain Walcot's
expressions of dissent from his leader's plans, which were more
forcible than soldierly. He was seething with wrath at Terrington's
treatment of her, and Terrington, aware of his excitement, but quite at
fault as to its cause, heard him with determined patience.
"And by which pass do you mean to retire?" he exclaimed at last, unable
to shake Terrington's resolve.
"By the Palári," said the other.
"The Palári!" cried Walcot derisively. "Why, it's the worst pass on
this side of the Pamir. May I ask why you've chosen it?"
"Have you been through the Palári or Darai?" Terrington enquired.
"No."
"Then you can hardly appreciate why I've chosen it," said Terrington
quietly. "The Palári is the only one which we've a chance of reaching
without being cut off; it's the only one not commanded from above at
this time of year, and Freddy Gale, holding this end of it at Rashát,
is absolutely done for unless we dig him out."
His reasons were listened to by the room in absorbing silence. Then
Walcot blurted out:
"Is this a council of war?"
"No," said Terrington; "it's an opportunity for protest. I wished to
put your advice on record, but I didn't propose to take it."
Walcot thereupon declared himself emphatically in favour of remaining
in Sar; Dore followed him less assertively. Clones gave a shrug of his
shoulders.
"It's all one to me where I doctor you," he smiled.
Terrington turned to the two men beside him, who had sat, immovably
attentive, throughout the discussion.
"We are as the print of thy footsteps," said Afzul Shah, and Hussain
nodded.
Terrington wrote for some moments, then read aloud his own dispositions
and the objections which had been urged against retirement. His own
plans and reasons were very bluntly outlined, but he gave the case for
the occupation of Sar with a fulness and cogency that astonished its
advocates, who did not suspect how dear the scheme had been to his
ambition, nor what its abandonment had cost him.
He handed the paper to Walcot.
"Will you sign it?" he said.
The best that was in the other man responded instinctively to such
treatment:
"You've put it a long way stronger than I could myself," he said,
taking up the pen.