The red fires shot up against shining rock reflection, throwing out
exaggerations or silhouettes of the shaggy figures moving about. Wild,
fantastic, as the surrounding crags were, thus thrown out into fitful
light, yet the place was an ideal one for a snug and sheltered camp,
where the keen mountain air struck chill at night, for it was sheltered
on three sides by rock and cliff, while the fourth gave out on a steep
drop into the valley beneath. To one, at any rate, the topographical
situation did not fail in significance. Not by sheer accident, not for
mere purposes of shelter had the situation been chosen.
In hanging clusters the stars shone brightly in the clear sky, but there
was no moon. The two Europeans, seated in their own camp a little
apart, had finished their evening meal--Mervyn incidentally, had been
allowed to go out, under escort, and shoot a few _chikor_ [the large
red-legged hill partridge], early that morning, so they had fared better
than heretofore. Now he had lighted a pipe, and was striving to conjure
up all the stoicism of the dim mysterious East to his aid, the while
keeping up the conversation with Melian, and doing so in such wise as to
convey no apprehension to her mind. And the keeping up of ordinary
conversation within an hour or so of one's own death is not an easy
undertaking; but then, John Seward Mervyn was not quite an ordinary man.
A few months ago, he would not greatly have concerned himself over this
situation. But within that time, life had changed and brightened for
him. It was more valuable up to date than it had been then. He turned
the talk on to Heath Hover and their time together there, and for a
little, the girl forgot their precarious and now depressing situation
and surroundings, and was responsive, brightening up with this and that
homely touch.
"Why, the heather must be flaming out in perfectly gorgeous crimson up
above the Plane woods," she said, "and we are not getting the benefit of
it this time. And that bit, down below Chiltingford, where we took
Violet the day before she left--that must be too ripping for anything.
And the jolly old battered mill, standing out on the open--I wish we
were there again, don't you, dear? Say you do."
The eager, retrospective tone had lapsed into seriousness. There was no
difficulty in replying as she wanted, and that with perfect truth and
candour. Mervyn, looking back on those fair scenes, spent with this
child; marking and treasuring all her golden joyousness and appreciation
of every sound and sight around her; thought that for a repetition of
just that time alone he would have faced the fate in front of him a
hundred times over. It was little enough of such sweet wholesome
happiness he had known in the course of a hard, rugged, bizarre life,
and that time about comprised it all.
Two wolves howled at responsive intervals away down in the valley
beneath, and the red glow of the camp fires played upon the bronzed,
hook-nosed faces, and fierce eyes, of the wild marauders of the desert,
squatted around, smoking their hookahs, and conversing in a deep
rumbling undertone. The owls would be softly hooting in the woods which
dipped their edges into Plane Pond at this moment, and the bell-like
plash of rising fish ring out on its starlit surface. Contrast indeed!
Here in this savage wilderness death was to be his at any hour, at any
moment. And now and thus, for the first time in his life, death seemed
hard to face.
"You have--what I gave you--safe, child?" he broke in, as though moved
by a sudden impulse. "Recollect, it is only to be produced in the very
last extremity, if the appeal to Shere Dil Khan should fail."
"Don't," she answered, startled by the solemnly spoken irrelevance of
the remark, and thrusting a hand into his. "You must really shake off
these dismal forebodings, dear--and yet, how can I undertake to lecture
you--_you_--on things that this weird country may hold out?"
And then, as if to give point to her words, a tall figure seemed to grow
out of the earth beside them. A murmured sentence or two, and as in
response to it he rose.
"Sit still, darling, and wait for me," he said. "I have to go and talk
with some of them, and it will be wearisome--especially as it interrupts
our talk about good old times." He rested one hand lovingly upon the
gold-crowned head, and then passed out with the man who had come to
summon him. He would not even take a real, long farewell of her, if
only that it might prove the reverse of advantageous to her, for he must
still keep up the pretence of ignorance, and yet it was the last time he
should behold her in this world, and he had but a shadowy belief in any
other. For John Seward Mervyn knew as well as did the man he was
accompanying that he was going to his doom.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It was a strange place, that in which he found himself but two or three
minutes later--a cavernous hall, yet walled around by solid rock, and of
some vastness. And yet, it seemed somehow as though it were not
entirely the work of Nature, even here, where Nature ran riot in the
production of wild freaks of her own masonry. It bore a look as though
ages and ages of gradual working had wrought it to such a pitch of
symmetry. In the centre a fire burned, the smoke escaping upwards
somehow and somewhere, for the atmosphere of the place was quite clear
of it.
Seated about this were some half dozen figures. Only one did Mervyn
recognise as that of Allah-din Khan. The others all looked strangers to
him. Stay. Only one? No, there was another; for in the one seated on
the right of the chief Mervyn recognised the tall, somewhat remarkable
looking man who had joined the rest at prayer. This one sat eyeing him,
an embodiment of Eastern stateliness, in snowy flowing garments, the
folds of his turban arranged round the conical _kulla_ which just peeped
above it, with an almost mathematical nicety. Mervyn took note of
something else. Behind him, two tall, ferocious looking Gularzai had
drawn up, standing so as to bar effectually the way by which he had been
ushered in. So this was to be his death chamber, he thought? Well, the
sooner it was over the better.
"Salaam, brothers," he began, but only by way of saying something.
"It is not `salaam,'" ["salaam"--Peace] answered the distinguished
looking stranger, speaking in a very deep chested tone. "You joined the
Brethren of the Night whose sign is the Five Pointed Star--were made
blood-brother with them, and--were false to them."
"Therein is not truth," answered Mervyn, who had expected this as an
opening of the proceedings.
"Not truth?" went on the speaker. "In thine English home the Sign was
delivered to thee; in thine English home--the long house with the
cornering wings which shelter the centre, and which stands beneath the
broad end of the water."
But that Mervyn had learned to be astonished at nothing, he might well
have felt surprised. Here was an exact description of Heath Hover, and
yet the only man who had seen it, and who bore the terrible and
mysterious Sign, had died within its walls, and the method of his death
he alone in all England knew. And now here in this far Eastern
wilderness was another--were others--who knew.
"The Sign was not delivered to me," he answered.
"Not delivered?" repeated the other slowly, and fixing upon his face a
glance that seemed to burn, so glowing was it with fell, vengeful
intent. "Not delivered? It was delivered not once only, but twice."
Now, indeed, the listener's self possession all but betrayed the shock
this announcement could not but cause him. How well he recalled that
lovely summer morning when he had looked out to behold the two girls
coming down the sluice path and Melian carrying the deadly shining thing
in her white, unsuspecting fingers--and his own frost of horror at the
sight. So all that time he had been shadowed, his every movement keenly
watched from the recesses of those hanging woods--not as he had thought
by honest English Nashby and his random, all-at-sea suspicions, but by
this deadly Brotherhood, whose ranks, in an ill-starred moment, and
moved chiefly by curiosity, he had joined. Yet how on earth could their
emissary or emissaries have hung about the Plane woods all that time
undetected by keepers, or unseen and uncommented on by the surrounding
rustic population? Of a truth the problem was a record one for
stiffness of solution. But he answered:
"It was not delivered once, nor yet twice. It was not delivered at
all."
The fierce, copper-hued, shaggy faces, the gleaming eyes reflected in
the firelight, were bent still more threateningly upon the speaker. The
latter, in sheer hopeless desperation, was probing behind his very brain
to try and make out a case for himself, and at the same time realising
its utter hopelessness; His remorseless indicter went on.
"The first who delivered thee the sign thou didst kill."
"That did I not. On the very contrary, I saved him--saved him from the
icy death. Listen brothers." And then Mervyn went on to give the
narrative of the events of that wild, sleet-tossed winter night, when we
first saw him. He told it graphically and well, speaking in the Pushtu
with, as had happened throughout all the dialogue, an odd word here and
there of a coined language peculiar to the Brotherhood, thrown in.
"Now? Did I not save him from certain death?" he concluded, looking
with an anxiety which he hoped did not appear, into the fierce faces
that ringed him round. But his heart sank within him, as he realised
that any hopes he might have entertained on that score were doomed; for
no sign of softening could he trace. On the contrary, the set grimness
on every countenance seemed to deepen.
"Not knowing him--then," supplied the stranger, who seemed to have
constituted himself--or been constituted--judge in chief, or president
of the proceedings. "Afterwards--that was made good." And his eyes
again seemed fixed with a deeper, more compelling glow, upon those of
the Englishman.
Mervyn stood as though petrified. The words, the mesmeric glance seemed
to take him out of himself--to take him back; back to--something.
Mechanically he raised a nerveless hand, and passed it over his eyes.
He saw--yes, assuredly he saw himself in dreamland, as it were. The
next words aroused him--brought him to himself--thoroughly, completely.
And they were spoken by Allah-din Khan.
"Thou double traitor," said the chief, in deep, growling tones. "For
the act of disobedience thine end should have been sure--sure but
swift--the Point of the Star. For this it shall be long, and lingering.
Look."