The position in which Terrington found himself requires to be explained.
Determined to clear out of Sar, three ways lay before him. The valley
of the Kotli to the south, through the Gate of the Great Evil, by
which, with Sir Colvin Aire, he had come up from Sampur; the Darai
Pass, due east across the Kalawari, and then south-east into the
Punjab; and the Palári, north-east, through the wild welter of ranges
under the roof of the world and over plains of snow to the western
border of Cashmir.
The first, though physically far the easiest, was out of the question,
since the road would be lined with hostile khels who could force him to
fight every mile of the way, with the odds of the ground and numbers
always against him.
The Darai, which came next in feasibility, was approached over an open
and exposed country, and was commanded from above in its most dangerous
defiles. Consequently it was by the Palári, the most arduous of all
the roads between Sar and Hindustan, that Terrington determined to
retire.
To Rashát, which Gale was holding at the foot of the Palári, there were
two roads from Sar. One, the longer, which Terrington had taken, led
up the left bank of the river through gorges of increasing grandeur
till the Sorágh Gul was reached. There the shorter road from Sar
joined it, and the two rose together to the snows. Terrington was
forced to go the longer way because he could cover his retreat along it
with a small rear-guard, and because the shorter passed through Sar
itself and beside the very gates of the Palace; but he had to face the
certainty of finding Mir Khan and his men at Sorágh Gul in a position
almost impregnable barring his advance upon Rashát. There, if wedged
between the force in front of him and that following him from Sar, he
would be forced to starve or to surrender.
The six hundred men under him were too few to be used offensively; he
could not squander them against odds in the open. If compelled to
fight his way across the Sorágh Gul not many of that six hundred would
find shelter in Rashát. By craft alone could he hope to reach the
Palári with the foe behind him, and the craft that should deceive Mir
Khan would have to be greatly daring. Greatly daring it was. He
divided his force into three parts. The first, composed entirely of
the Guides Cavalry Bengal Lancers, was to push on by forced marches to
the further side of the double-headed valley which ended in the Sorágh
Gul. Being mounted, on a fairly good road and with eight hours' start,
it could reach this before the enemy, who was mostly on foot, could
arrive by the shorter road through Bewal. Sending on a summons to
Rashát for every man that could be spared, Walcot, who commanded the
cavalry, had orders to wait the arrival of Mir Khan from Bewal, and
then, making as much dust as possible, to retire slowly on Rashát,
fighting as determined a rear-guard action as he could without exposing
his men, in order to draw Mir Khan after him across the Gul. It was
Terrington's hope that the Khan, seeing British troops beyond the Gul,
would imagine that the entire force had reached it by a superhuman
effort and, after a perfunctory search of the road towards Sar, would
follow furiously in order to drive it headlong into Rashát.
To complete the deception, the central portion of Terrington's force,
consisting of the Sikhs and Bakót levies in charge of the transport,
were to remain concealed and not to approach the Gul till the Khan's
intentions became apparent; and the Guides forming the rearguard had
orders so to delay pursuit along the river road from Sar that the
pursuers' fire should not reach Mir Khan's ears at the Gul for at least
twelve hours after he had reached it.
Then if Mir Khan came to the lure, and followed Walcot, the Sikhs were
to push on at full speed, seize the road where it crossed the Gul, and
await the rush for safety of the enemy on finding that he was trapped.
It was a scheme of extreme audacity, but in its audacity lay its
safety. In splitting up his little force Terrington seemed to be
offering it for destruction in detail, but the offering was of such
effrontery that no one, and Mir Khan least of all, was likely to be
prepared for it. It afforded, so far as Terrington could see, his only
chance of a blow decisive enough to cripple for the moment Mir Khan's
power. If it failed of that the force was doomed. Yet, if it should
fail, what else would have succeeded?
Though Terrington had urged Rose Chantry to rest while she could, the
morning light was peering between the curtains of the doolie before
sleep closed her eyes. She listened all night to the silent march: the
grunts and whinny of the mules, the jangle of harness, the low-spoken
orders of unseen men. And under it all the beat of feet in the dust,
the quick clatter of driven hoofs, the dull even tramp of armed men.
When she woke it was high noon and her doolie was resting upon the
ground. She pulled aside the curtain and looked out upon a land
unknown to her. The doolie stood against a clump of tamarisk, but no
other greenness met her eye in that valley of stones. The river
bubbled somewhere beneath her out of sight; and, reaching to the sky,
on either side of it stood astounding walls of rock, some sheer and
broken into awful precipices, others vast shelving slopes of shale
which gave an even more oppressive sense of distance and desolation
than the cliffs themselves. A jagged ribbon of blue sky showed between
them overhead, scarcely wider than the hidden bed of the river, and the
sun blazed down into that cleft of air like the mouth of a furnace.
The heat fastened with a slap upon her hand as she stretched it out
into the sunlight, and the whole valley seemed to bend and waver in the
clear vapour that streamed from every stone. A little green tent was
pitched beside the doolie under the tamarisk, but the only other sign
of a camp came from the span, of mules being driven down to the water,
and some fifty brown blankets stretched between rifles and pegged down
with bayonets in the shade of which men were lying in every shape of
dreamless sleep. They looked, even to her unpractised eye, terribly
few in that wilderness of space.
As she crawled out of the doolie she discovered that there was a sentry
posted over her and the tent, who presented arms, much to her
embarrassment, as she scrambled up from her knees.
She could see no sign of her ayah, but in the tent she found her
dressing-things laid out on a folding camp-table; there was a canvas
basin on a trestle, which was also none of hers, and a canvas bath on
the floor.
She questioned the sentry in her broken mixture of tongues about the
ayah, but he could tell her nothing, and evidently had not seen a woman
about the place.
So, very shyly, and after cautious tying of the tent-flap, testing of
its skirts, and closing of its little grated window, she began her
first toilet in camp, pausing, poised, to listen to every strange sound
without, and especially between every splash of the water in her bath.
She was coiling her hair about her head before the tiny mirror in one
dense twist, which displayed better than any fashionable device its
golden thickness, when she heard the slap of the sentry's hand on the
stock of his rifle, and Terrington's voice outside the tent.
"Hope you slept," it rang out cheerily. "Gholam is getting us
something to eat as soon as you're ready."
Rose Chantry's head came through the flap of the tent, with a white arm
and elbow moulding the last roll of her hair.
"Where's my ayah?" she asked plaintively.
"I wish I knew," said Terrington, handing over his horse to a sais and
lifting his helmet. "When we started last night she wasn't to be
found. You'll have to put up, I'm afraid, with Gholam's valeting."
He offered her the idea lightly, as though it were all part of a
picnic; but he had ridden through the night, after the ayah's flight
had been discovered, tortured by the thought of the woman, sleeping in
the litter in front of him, young, lovely, widowed and alone among six
hundred men, without a single other of her sex to shield her from the
coarseness and defilement of war.
He well knew how men, pressed by the necessities of the field and
simplified by the daily presence of death, reverted to a savage
shamelessness, a sweeping aside of convention, not at all to their
discredit, but of a very fearful grossness to a woman's eyes: and he
felt, contemplating the future of the next few days, almost as if he
were the accomplice of some iniquitous abduction.
Rose Chantry noticed--she was learning to notice--that Terrington had
not been out of the saddle since he left Sar. A smoke of dust fell
from the wrinkles of his tunic and breeches as he slid to the ground,
and there were tiny furrows of dust upon his face. She noticed
too--but that needed no learning--how the searching hard-browed look of
the scout went suddenly out of his eyes as they fell upon her, and the
lines about his lips relaxed. He had ridden forward to the hanging
bridge where alone the river could be crossed below the Gul, as Walcot
had sent back word that it would require strengthening to carry the
transport, and he was of necessity his own engineer. So he had missed
the sleep and meal of which his men had partaken, and had some reason
to look way-worn when he appeared before Rose Chantry's tent after
thirty hours of unceasing strain.
Yet when he reappeared, washed and shaven, fifteen minutes later, he
seemed as alert as though he had but just left his bed. Responsibility
always endued him with double strength.
Gholam Muhammed could discover nothing better than a broken
biscuit-case to set the breakfast on, so Rose brought out the camp
table from her tent and improvised a tablecloth from a Russian towel.
Terrington, returning to find her seated in the shade of the tamarisk
making tea, looking, thanks to the close coils about her head, more
astoundingly young than ever, blithe and fresh as an English morning,
caught his breath with a sharper sense of her isolation.
He seated himself on the biscuit-case at the further side of the table,
and his glance travelled from her up the forbidding precipices, and
back again to her trim figure.
"Well!" she enquired provokingly; "you're wishing me a thousand miles
away?"
"I am," he nodded.
"You're not half grateful for your mercies," she retorted; "it ought to
be rather a change to have a woman to pour out tea for you before a
battle!"
"Oh, it is a change," he smiled.
She handed him a mug of blue and white enamel.
"And is there going to be a battle?"
"Not to-day," he said.
"To-morrow?"
"Probably."
"And shall we all be killed?"
"It's not impossible," he said gravely.
She leant her lips down to her own brimming mug and looked across at
him over its edge.
"Don't you wish you were safe back in Sar?" she said.
He shook his head as she lifted and drained the mug and set it down
with a sigh of content.
"I _was_ so thirsty. Isn't it grilling? Why did you make me wear
these clothes? I can't see much sign of the snows. Isn't this tinned
milk horrid? What's become of all the men? You don't seem to have
kept many to look after me! Will you have an egg?"
"Please," said Terrington to her last question.
"Was that your bath and basin I had this morning?" she went on.
"It was," he said.
"I don't see why I should be clean at your cost," she demurred.
"Oh, you're not," he assured her; "you're the only one in the force
with time to be clean at all, and even you won't want to wash after
to-morrow."
"We shall all be killed, shan't we?" she asked mischievously.
"Whether or not," he said drily; "we shall be too cold to have much use
for water."
"I can't imagine such a condition just now," she answered.
"You'll be able to when you've crossed the Palári," said Terrington
quietly.
She twisted her chair sideways, put one hand above the other across the
back of it, and leant her chin upon them both. She watched Terrington
so for a few seconds while he finished his egg. Then she asked:
"What have you done with Captain Walcot?"
"He's commanding the advance-guard."
"Miles and miles away?"
"I hope so by now," he said.
"Is _he_ going to fight to-day?"
"No."
"To-morrow? When we all do?"
"Mir Khan permitting," said Terrington with a smile.
"Will it be more dangerous where he is than where we shall be?"
"No," said Terrington; "rather safer. He'll have a line of retreat."
"Safer!" she echoed with astonishment; "then why didn't you send me
with him?"
Terrington looked at her thoughtfully as he inverted the tin of milk
above his mug.
"Pure selfishness," he said. "I wanted some one to pour out tea for me
before the battles."
"I don't see why you shouldn't speak the truth," she pouted.
"I don't see why you should want it spoken if you know it so well," he
said.
"You were afraid to send me with him!" she thrust out sharply.
"Was I?" he said, cutting off the drip of the milk with his spoon.
"Yes! You were afraid he'd spend his time with me instead of looking
after his men."
Terrington pushed the kedgeri towards her persuasively, but she shook
her head.
"Do you know that Captain Walcot is in love with me?" she went on.
"How should I?" he said, helping himself to the dish she had declined.
She gave a little hopeless sigh at his obtuseness and a complacent tilt
of the head.
"He's been in love with me ever since he came to Sar," she asserted.
"Has he?" said Terrington, puzzled by the confidence.
"Yes," she nodded. "You think that very wrong, I suppose?"
"Well," he admitted mildly, "do you think it very right yourself."
She straightened her shoulders, lifting her chin, and her grip
tightened on the back of the chair.
"It's not a question of what I do or don't think right," she said with
sudden fierceness; "it's a question of what a woman's got to be and to
put up with out here if she's tolerably good looking. You think we're
just silly fools, who laugh and chatter and let men make love to us.
You don't know that it's just to keep things pleasant, and prevent rows
for one's husband in little places like Sar, where every one's jumbled
together, that one does laugh, and chatter, and pretend not to see
things, and seem to like things that one hates. You suppose, because
we don't make a fuss, that we're frivolous and empty-headed, and don't
think for a moment what a time you'd have of it if we went in for being
anything else."
"No," said Terrington doubtfully; "I don't suppose we do."
He was perplexed by her revelation, never imagining that it came of a
desire for his good opinion, and resenting her careless sacrifice of
another man's secret. He knew nothing about women, nor how little they
counted a loss of honour from the sacrifice of anything in what could
be considered an excusing cause.
So that he was quite unprepared when, with her elbow propped upon the
chair, and turning her back upon his vague admission, she said in a
voice uncontrollably unsteady.
"Oh, I know what you think of me!"
Terrington, who neither knew what he thought of her nor what she
thought he thought of her, held his tongue, and Rose, with her back
still towards him, and after a sniff at the opposite hills, continued
less precariously:
"Do you think it's impossible for a woman to change?"
"Oh, surely," he protested, smiling; "that's never been urged against
her."
"You might be serious when you know I am," she said with such a grieved
reproach that Terrington repented his levity. "Mayn't a woman learn
something sometimes from things that happen, even though she was once a
fool?"
"Yes, I'm sure she may," he assented heartily; "and much quicker than a
man."
She turned about towards him gratefully.
"Yes," she sighed, "but you'll never believe that I shall be good for
anything, after what I did in Sar?"
"Oh, shan't I!" he said cheerily. He finished his tea, and smiled at
her with a new friendliness across the table. "Look here," he said,
"I'm going to turn in, and I want you to wake me in an hour's time.
Will you?"
She nodded.
"But you want more than an hour."
"Yes," he said, "but I'm not going to get it." He looked at his wrist.
"That'll be on the stroke of three. You've got a watch?"
She held hers to her ear.
"It's stopped," she said.
He unfastened his from his wrist and handed it to her.
"Wouldn't you like a sleep yourself," he suggested.
"Oh, no!" she said.
He threw himself down in the shade of the tamarisk, and, leaning on his
elbow, glanced at her for a moment doubtfully.
"It's only to be an hour," he reminded her; "not what you think I want."
"You're going to be called at three," she said precisely.
He smiled at her little air of responsibility as he laid his head down
upon his arm, and she, seeing that he had nothing on which to rest it,
got up quickly and fetched him a pillow from her doolie.
"Why didn't you ask me for it," she said reproachfully.
He took it from her with another smile.
"I'm so unused to the luxury of being looked after by a lady."
But he gave her hand a clasp which meant a good deal more to it than
gratitude.
Rose Chantry sat almost motionless during the hour which followed, in
that happy sort of preoccupation which is outside of time. She had
strapped on Terrington's watch, to feel the loose shackle of it about
her thin wrist, and looked now and again at its face with startled
consciousness, unaware if minutes or hours had gone by since her last
inspection.
The valley lay oppressively silent in the fierce heat. The mirage had
eaten up its northern end, and the close-set precipices had melted into
an open space of air, which showed, with the strangest effect of
disappearance, nothing beyond.
Thin blue threads of smoke stretched up to heaven from the forsaken
camp fires, and the mules which had come back from watering floundered
in the dust; but nothing else seemed to move between those walls of
stone except the ceaseless waver of the heated air.
Terrington slept without stirring; his lips set as firmly as when he
was awake, his lids closed like a mask in bronze, as if rather with
determination than from drowsiness.
Rose could not help comparing the strong guarded look of his sleeping
face with the flaccid abandonment of Lewis Chantry's, who always
slumbered with his mouth open and his eyelids half apart.
At three she leant over and put her finger upon his arm, and his eyes
opened quiet and wide awake as though she had touched the spring of his
consciousness.
He rose at once, whistled for his horse, was in the saddle three
minutes later, and riding, a solitary figure, up the gray road of the
stony valley towards the bridge.
Rose Chantry watched till the undulating outlines of both horse and
rider were dissolved in the distorting glare, with a feeling in her
heart which no man before had ever brought there.