After the night under that gable in the roof of the world, many things
happened; but there ended the siege of Sar. For Sar is, in the old
tongue of Maristan, the word that stood alike for the kingdom's centre,
the heart's core, and this was a siege unprepared and unintended, by a
girl of a man's heart. For it was to the girl that he surrendered.
The rest of the retreat, the cold neglect with which the Government of
India tried to treat the little force, the angry expostulation of the
Press of England, and the tardy honours, are they not written in the
book of the Rulers of India, and in the heart of a people that does not
forget?
But with his crossing of the Palári, Terrington's achievement ceases.
The rest was mere marching. Thanks, indeed, to his diplomacy it was
mere marching, and that not a sword was drawn against him on the road
home. But he thought little of such success; he had a natural
capacity, he said, for creating false impressions.
He came very near incapacity during the first day of the descent: for
his vigil of the night before had cost him the use of both his arms and
legs. Rose prayed him to be carried in her doolie, but he knew the
effect the breakdown of his seemingly unassailable strength would have
upon his men, and had himself tied upon the back of his little pony,
and led, with no slackening for his infirmities, wherever his
encouragement or his counsel was required.
The perpetual jogging down-hill was, in his condition, not a bad
imitation of martyrdom, which, in his heart he bore as deserved for
having spent his strength upon a woman instead of for his men.
But the power came back to his arms by the way, perhaps from sheer
pain; and the use he found for them at the end of the day, when, though
still in the snow, the weary little band gathered warm and happy about
fires of fir, certainly suggested no regrets to the woman they enfolded.