NO FOOTSTEP STIRRED--THE HATED WORLD ALL SLEPT,
SAVE ONLY THEE AND ME. (OH, HEAVEN! OH, GOD!)
The following morning Eleanor, her face bright with smiles, kisses
Carol as she bids him adieu.
"Shoot something nice for dinner, dear," she says, "and have a good
day."
She waves her hand as he trots down the hill, his slim form erect, his
eyes bright and lips parted.
"I hope you won't be dull, Eleanor," he cries with a gay laugh. "Keep
house till I return, and take care of yourself."
As he fades from sight she turns singing into the bungalow.
There are several duties to be attended to. Her pink muslin gown needs
rearranging, and the huge bunch of crimson flowers Quamina has gathered
her must be put in the drawing-room. They are bright, and will please
Carol's eye.
As she places them in tall, picturesque vases, Paulina's words return
with aggressive force.
The sort of woman who stays at home tending flowers! They take the
pleasure from her simple task. She leaves the fallen blossoms half on
a couch, half on the ground, turning from them disgusted.
Perhaps Paulina was right! Carol would find her far more of a
companion if she shouldered her gun and rode off with him to the
jungle; but she hates killing things.
The chase is brutal! Sport is revolting! Thus she consoles herself,
and sends Quamina for the muslin gown.
How tenderly Carol had kissed her when he said good-bye. How brilliant
he seemed that morning!
She laughs again at the thought of his wit. Her Carol was always
clever.
He has marked a passage of Spencer's in a novel Eleanor is reading; she
picks it up and comes across it.
It is like a rude shock. Why has he pencilled such disagreeable lines?
Full little knowest thou that hast not tried.
What hell it is in suing long to bide;
To loose good dayes that might be better spent,
To waste long nights in pensive discontent.
Perhaps it struck him as so strangely different to their ideal
existence.
The hours do not seem long, for a "light heart goes all the day," but
as afternoon wanes she is filled with expectant delight, awaiting
Carol's advent. He will be naturally tired, and she draws the couch
near the window, piles luxurious pillows upon it, and perches herself
at the end of it, placing in readiness a loose lounging coat of yellow
Tussore silk. Carol, it is a pretty name, she thinks, taking up his
portrait and pressing it to her lips. It is in the same attitude as
the one she destroyed in the railway train, upon her first meeting with
Elizabeth Kachin's mother.
The faint light slants across the verandah, and falls on the yellow
cushions placed for Quinton.
It creeps into the room, and sheds a halo round the striking likeness
she still holds in her hand.
Eleanor gazes at the Oriental splendour, the beauties of which no
utterance is capable of expressing, and indulges in visions that are
pleasant and soothing, marvelling at a scene she has admired a thousand
times before, and recalling memories of sweet caresses and whispered
words.
Filmy shadows fall from the trees without, gradually outlining
themselves upon the walls of the room, and the steps from the verandah.
The hot air rises from the valley.
Eleanor breathes the tropical atmosphere and sighs. She loosens her
gown at the throat, and waves an enormous palm-leaf fan leisurely
backwards and forwards. The air stirs the soft hair on her forehead,
cooling her brow.
She raises her eyes to the clock and smiles.
"He will soon return," she thinks. "It is growing late, and he
promised to be home before nightfall."
She goes out on to the verandah, gazing down the road which leads to
Mandalay.
Two or three black children are resting by a wall at the foot of the
hill, one squatting on the ground hugging his knees, the others
standing in easy graceful attitudes, with round pitchers on their heads.
The well is beneath a huge palm. Eleanor has sometimes "wished" by it
with Carol, pretending there is some mystic spell in the water.
He will pass that charmed spot as he returns, and she will stand on the
steps to greet him.
Surely in all the world Carol could not have chosen a more romantic
retreat in which to live and love!
The shadows deepen, they take forms, and glide from place to place as
daylight dies.
She peers into the gloom, the children go home to bed. Carol is not in
sight!
The red flowers of the morning lie withered up and brown on the floor
where she has left them. Carol must not be greeted by the sight of her
negligence. She stoops down, and gathers them together in both hands,
sweeping the dust and fallen petals into her white palm. Crossing
slowly to the door, Eleanor calls Quamina.
"Take these away," she says.
Quamina looks anxiously into her face, as she relieves her young
mistress of the dead blossoms.
"The Sahib is long in returning," she volunteers, with a nervous leer.
"Yes. We shall soon need a light."
"The devil will not catch him this evening; the devil is well
employed," Quamina assures her. "Have no fear, lady."
"What do you mean?" asks Eleanor, a shade of anger crossing her face.
Quamina looks up proudly, delightedly.
"I have placed food and drink in the rock away from the roadside," she
replies chuckling. "He will be busy eating, and never see the Sahib
riding up the path. Quamina loves the Sahib and his white lady; she
will provide for the devil."
Eleanor shrugs her shoulders in sheer despair. She cannot bring this
woman to reason. With a pitying smile she returns to the window, and
buries her fingers in the soft silk of those yellow pillows with an
almost frantic clutch. They are just like the sofa cushions at
Lyndhurst. Philip, perhaps, is lounging on them now, or Erminie--he
has given them to Mrs. Lane for her new drawing-room.
She kneels for a while on the lounge, and though there is no sound her
lips move.
Thus she stays, directly opposite the open window, listening and
looking, wondering and praying.
Can some evil have befallen him? She remembers his displeasure when
she rode out to meet him that night--the man with the black mask.
There is a loud report in the room; she springs to her feet with a cry.
It is only a string of her guitar which has broken, and she sinks back
into the old attitude despairingly.
Quamina is pounding rice in the kitchen. Eleanor calls to her to stop.
She fancies the sound may prevent her hearing the first fall of a
horse's hoofs in the distance, for the moon has not risen yet, and she
cannot see far.
So she remains perfectly still, waiting for the pale light to rise in
the heavens, while crowds of unutterable fancies rush through her
brain--a mad disorder of thought.
She stares outwards, as one in the fetters of an awful dream.
"Why does he not come to her?"
Some well-known words recur to her brain. "The eye, like a shattered
mirror, multiplies the images of its sorrow, and sees, in innumerable
far-off places, the woe which is close at hand."
There is a hot and heavy vapour in the air--it seems to poison Eleanor
as she inhales it in her lungs. A settled apathy pervades her spirit.
For some moments she feels nothing, has not a thought--only a strange
ringing in her head. The landscape before her looks desolate and
terrible, an unredeemed dreariness darkens her soul like a London
fog--thick, stifling.
London! The word recalls Philip, the man whose home she shattered,
whose life she ruined--for Carol's sake. It was easy to deal the blow,
to forget the world, to forfeit her good name when love's overpowering
fascination was the bait. She can annihilate that black past in the
light of Carol's smile; but when he is absent, and night is on the
earth and in her heart, then the spectre rises, points his deadly
finger at her quivering soul, and she realises the hideous dropping off
of the veil. Her mind is a chaos of ruins. She calls to Carol in
vain; only the shrill cry of some night bird through the air, and the
beating of her pulses, answer that he will not come!
The gaunt form of a four-footed beast steals across the shadows she has
watched so long, that she almost doubts her senses. Can it be a tiger
perchance come forth from the jungle to prowl around her home?
She looks again, a thrill of horror darting through her trembling body.
The beast creeps with a soft and stealthy tread up the verandah
steps--it is long and yellow.
Eleanor stares in mesmeric terror at its fiery eyes.
Then she sees it is a dog--a huge sandy mastiff, with hanging jaws, wet
with foam, a great square head, and broad noiseless feet. It shambles
nearer, appearing so suddenly out of the gloom that it seems to
materialise before her vision. It watches her as if about to spring;
she cannot remember it is not a tiger after all.
Eleanor sickens with fear, a dizzy faintness numbs her nerves, the room
swims round. Her breath comes in quick gasps from a throat parched,
and dry as with desert sand.
She stares dumbly into its glistening eyes that look like coals of fire
in the dark.
Those moments seem to be long hours; they are spells of invisible woe;
this dog is perhaps a phantom, come to warn her of some ghastly peril
into which Carol has fallen. Its fangs look ripe for human gore; it
pants, and its breath is as the rush of a storm.
"Help!" says a low voice, calling the dog by name.
The animal turns at the sound of that word. "Help! come back." He
crouches away disappointed; he would have liked to seize Eleanor by the
throat if he dared.
At the sound of the man's call Eleanor does not move, nor even start,
only the blood seems to dry up in her veins, her fingers twitch
convulsively, her eyes roll back in her head. She can hear the heavy
footfalls mounting the steps to the verandah one by one; she dares not
look, for she _knows_, she _understands_!
Then a sudden idea seizes her. They are not yet face to face. If her
paralysed limbs will let her she may yet escape through the room, and
out behind. She can hide in the thick undergrowth, and watch her
opportunity to creep down the road and warn Carol of the danger
threatening their lives. He may even now be passing the well and
riding up the hill to death!
She rushes blindly across the room, but that instant the heavy steps
reach the verandah. Her aim is frustrated. She staggers against the
wall, extending her arms aloft with a wild gesture.
The intruder stands in the open window, his dark figure framed, in the
line between the verandah and the interior, his face illuminated by the
moon which has burst like a ghostly lamp-man over the east. She feels
like one dazed in the trammels of opium. She tries to cry out, to
shriek for help, but only one word breaks hoarsely from her lips with a
hollow groan:
"Philip!"
The man enters the room silently, his garments are thick with dust, his
coat torn as with jungle briars sharply thorned. He looks as if he had
lived in the outer air, unkempt, dishevelled! Thick black hair has
grown over the lower part of his face; but his eyes gleam as they meet
hers while he advances, his gaze riveted on Eleanor. A fierce growl
makes him turn, and his eyes fall on the lounging coat of Tussore silk
lying upon yellow cushions.
"Help" has scented it, and springing with his huge paws towards the
sofa, tears and rends it furiously in his heavy jaws with the savage
air of a lion destroying prey.
The sight is strangely horrible to Eleanor. Her eyes start from their
sockets, staring, bloodshot, fixed. Her lips are livid, her limbs
stiff, she is still drawn up against the wall at bay; but for its
support she would fall upon the ground.
Philip smiles. The action of the dog pleases him. He does not notice
the photograph of Carol, which dropped from Eleanor's hands as she
started across the room, but the heel of his dusty boot falls on the
face, crushing it under the weight of his tread, scarring the features
and cracking the card. He advances and stands passively before
Eleanor, so close that his hot breath fans her cheek, looking at her
and waiting.
The steady ticking of the clock resounds in the room; in that moment of
extreme tension it deafens her.
The silence is horrible, unendurable; she struggles to break it, and
her voice sounds to her own amazement perfectly natural.
"I know why you have come, Philip," she says calmly, and it seems that
she has lived through this moment in some past existence, so painfully
familiar are the ghastly occurrences of to-night. Perhaps it was in
some shadowy dream which faded from her memory on awaking. "I know why
you are here," she repeats throwing back her head against the bamboo
panelling, and stretching out her arms in the attitude of a crucified
victim. "I read it in your face. But I am too young to die, too
sin-stained."
"You think I have come to kill you, Eleanor?"
His words are low and hollow; they seem strangely similar to the
warning growl of his huge dog. She thinks he has grown to resemble the
ferocious-looking beast, or "Help," in the moonlight, appears like his
master--from perpetual companionship.
But even as she looks, something of the man creeps into Philip's eyes,
humanising them. The brute nature fades.
She answers his question under her breath:
"Yes, you have hunted me down to take my life."
An expression of intense pain contracts his features; she has cut him
to the quick.
With a woman's sharp instinct, intensified by dread, Eleanor sees that
her doom is not yet; but the thought of another burns like fire in her
brain. Her own miserable thread of life, what does it matter? She
holds it as nought compared with the one she loves. She would die a
thousand deaths if such a sacrifice would buy him safety.
"How little you understand me!" he says at last. "It was always so."
"Why have you come?" she asks, faintly tracing the shadows that fall
around him in the pallid moonlight.
He turns, as if in answer, to the scattered rags of a silken coat, some
of which still hang in the mastiff's jaws; then his gaze travels
through the verandah, down the zig-zag path towards the jungle.
Eleanor interprets the look. With a swift movement she wrenches
herself from the wall against which she has seemed to be held as if by
a strong magnet, crosses the room with quick and noiseless tread,
fastens the folding window doors together with a click, facing Philip
in defiant silence.
"You have come for him," she hisses, the hatred in her eyes gleaming
forth. "You would kill--Carol."
At the mention of his name from her lips Philip starts.
"Is it not so?" she cries wildly, raising her voice, which trembles
with emotion, vibratos with dread.
For the moment Philip does not reply, only his face lights up as with
the glory of revenge.
Eleanor's fingers tighten on the window fastening. She clings to it
for support.
A strangled cry breaks from her lips, and the half incoherent words:
"My God! My God!"