"And methought that beauty and terror were only one, not two;
And the world has room for love and death, and thunder and dew;
And all the sinews of Hell slumber in summer air;
And the face of God is a rock; but the face of the rock is fair."
--R.L.S.
That same evening after sunset, a hospital doolie was set down in the
verandah, and from it emerged Paul Wyndham--a long lean figure of a
man, whose most notable features were deep steadfast eyes, neither blue
nor grey; a mouth of extraordinary gentleness and capacity for
endurance; and the grave quietness of movement and speech, that may
mean power in perfect equilibrium or mere dulness.
Desmond and Honor welcomed him with unconcealed affection; and for
himself, his descent into the Valley of the Shadow seemed a small price
to pay for a convalescence cheered by the ministrations of these two,
than whom there were none dearer to him on earth. Of the unalterable
nature of his feeling for Honor, both husband and wife were well aware;
though no word of it ever passed their lips. They were aware, also,
that the love of a man like Paul Wyndham was a thing apart; implying
neither disloyalty to his friend, nor the remotest danger to any of the
three concerned. Conditions inconceivable to the pedestrian order of
mind.
Too weak to fret against enforced inaction at a time of stress, Wyndham
passed his days between sleeping and waking and eating; between rare
talks with Lenox and Desmond, and the restfulness diffused through
heart and brain and body by Honor's constant presence at his bedside.
She had amply fulfilled the promise given him more than four years ago
of close and privileged friendship; and he counted himself more blest
in its possession than many a man who wins the entire woman, to find
her no more than a plaster goddess after all.
Honor herself, apart from the natural woman's pleasure in nursing an
appreciative patient, was thankful for a definite demand upon her time.
For Theo was seldom available now, except for an occasional
after-dinner drive, through darkness two degrees cooler than high noon;
and beneath her surface serenity she suffered keenly from the ache of
empty arms; from the completeness of separation involved in leaving a
child too young to span distance even by hieroglyphs, profusely
decorated with 'kisses,' such as she had seen women treasure in the
days of her young ignorance. Mrs Rivers wrote constantly and
copiously. But can the most unwearied pen set down all that a mother
craves to know about her child?
At the end of a week, Lenox was with them still. To his sole
suggestion of departure, Desmond had merely replied: "My dear man,
don't talk nonsense. When we've had enough of you, we'll let you know
it, without ceremony!" And Lenox, strangely loth to return to his
bachelor quarters, took him at his word, and stayed on.
Yet the two men saw little enough of one another. For on the Frontier
work means work: and when cholera hovers over the station like a bird
of prey, it is carried on with redoubled vigour. Only by constant
occupation can fear and fatalism be held at arm's-length. Only the
infectious mettle of the British officer can infuse into all ranks that
cheerful alertness which, at a time of epidemic, is the finest
safeguard in the world. There is much virtue, also, in mere routine,
one of the wingless good angels of earth; and only those who have
proved its power to drag broken heart or broken body through the things
that must be done, estimate it at its true value.
In Lenox's case, it helped to deaden the prick of anxiety as to the
future and the physical ache of longing; for as Commandant with two out
of four subalterns on the 'sick list,' he had his hands full; and
Desmond, the Colonel's chosen friend and ally in all regimental
matters, was in the same enviable condition. The more so, since he and
Meredith between them had anticipated the modern theory that the spread
of cholera or fever can be partially checked by a determined assault on
flies and mosquitoes, the great disease-breeders of the East; a
suggestion received at that time with a mild amusement, bordering on
scorn. But the two men, zealous for the credit and welfare of the
regiment--the Great Fetish 'that claims the lives of all and lives for
ever'--determined to give the new notion a fair trial in their own
Lines; and Desmond, as may be supposed, flung himself heart and soul
into the organisation of this very novel form of campaign! Plunged
neck-deep again in the work he loved, there seemed no limit to his
tireless energy; and from the Colonel downward, all were heartily glad
to get him back.
Even in an age given over to the marketable commodity, England can
still breed men of this calibre. Not perhaps in her cities, where
individual aspiration and character are cramped, warped, deadened by
the brute force of money, the complex mechanism of modern life: but in
unconsidered corners of her Empire, in the vast spaces and comparative
isolation, where old-fashioned patriotism takes the place of parochial
party politics, and where, alone, strong natures can grow up in their
own way.
It is to the Desmonds and Merediths of an earlier day that we are
indebted for the sturdy loyalty of our Punjab and Frontier troops, for
our hold upon the fighting races of the North. India may have been won
by the sword, but it has been held mainly by attributes of heart and
spirit; by individual strength of purpose, capacity for sympathy and
devotion to the interests of those we govern. When we fail in these,
and not till then, will power pass out of our hands.
That there was no such failure among the little band of Englishmen
throughout that inglorious campaign against an enemy one could never
have the satisfaction of thrashing in the open, the attitude of their
Native officers and men bore ample witness. Light-hearted
subalterns--whisked away from half-fledged love affairs, or the more
serious business of sport--might curse their luck with blasphemous
vigour; older men might grumble openly at extra parades, at the strain
of additional vigilance and discipline; but for all that, the work was
done,--thoroughly, and with a will; not within the station only, but
out there on the open plain, rolling in vast undulations to the naked
spurs of the Saliman range, where the sun smote through the canvas as
if it had been so much brown paper and the stricken regiment strove, by
constantly shifting ground, to shake off the pursuing horror that
steadily thinned its ranks. Here Colonel Stanham Buckley waked each
morning with the cold clutch of fear at his heart; fortified himself
with incessant 'nips' throughout the day; and left the bulk of the work
to a cheery little Adjutant, untroubled by the sorrowful great gift of
imagination. And here, as in the station, all officers were diligent
in visits to the hospital; heartening the sufferers by their presence,
and combating, as far as might be, the Oriental's fatalistic attitude
towards disease and death. Perhaps only those who have had close
dealings with the British officer in time of action or emergency
realise, to the full, the effective qualities hidden under a careless
or conventional exterior:--the vital force, the pluck, endurance, and
irrepressible spirit of enterprise, which--it has been aptly said--make
him, at his best, the most romantic figure of our modern time.
And while indefatigable soldiers fought the enemy in camp and in the
Lines, Dudley Norton, O.S.I., Deputy Commissioner, and ruler-in-chief
of the station, fought him no less energetically in the bazaar and
native city; an even more heart-breaking task. For here was no
disciplined body of men, but a swarm of prejudiced individuals, caring
nothing for infection, and everything for the sanctity of house and
caste. Precautions and sanitary measures had to be carried at the
point of the bayonet; and they were so carried. For Dudley Norton, no
novice at Frontier work, had long since made himself wholesomely feared
and respected throughout the Derajat; while, among the Maliks of his
district, his hawk-like eyes gleaming under heavy brows were accredited
with the power of watching a man's thoughts at their birth. A
reputation too useful to be discouraged!
Like all detached frontier civilians, he practically lived at the
station mess; except on fugitive occasions, when a placidly handsome
woman, bearing his name, vouchsafed him a flying visit from home; for
no other reason--said the evil-minded--than to establish a right-of-way
over her property. At these times Norton welcomed, and entertained his
wife with a scrupulous politeness and concern for her physical
well-being that was a tragedy in itself; and eventually 'saw her off'
at the nearest railway station with a sigh of relief. For, once--in a
former life, it seemed--he had been in love with her; and the ghost of
a dead passion is an ill companion at bed and board. At the present
moment, he had seen neither her nor his only son for more than five
years; and of the small daughter, whose coming had transfigured his
life, there remained only a cross in Kohat cemetery, and a faded photo
of the flagrantly unnatural type that prevailed in the late 'seventies.
But the man who gives his heart to the Indian Borderland must steel
himself to forgo much that, in the arrogance of youth, he has deemed
indispensable to happiness, or even to living at all.
Frontier service begets closer contact between soldier and civilian,
both in work and play, than cantonment life down country; most often to
the uprooting of prejudice on both sides; and Norton was one of the few
men in the station who had achieved comparative intimacy with Lenox.
Those formidable eyes of his had been quick to detect in the taciturn
Gunner, who had done so much, and had so little to say about it, a
coming 'political' of no mean quality, a man of ideas and ambitions,
for whom the great country of his service was something more than a
vast playground, or shooting-box; in effect, a man after his own heart.
Thus, finding Lenox established at the Desmonds, Norton called upon
them soon after Honor's arrival. He was rewarded by a standing
invitation to 'drop in' any afternoon, or evening that he happened to
be free, an invitation which Honor extended to most of the men who came
to bid her welcome; and tea at the Desmonds--with iced coffee or pegs
as alternatives, and smoking a matter of course--soon became a daily
institution; a respite, if only for an hour or two, from the monotony
of mess, parade-ground, and hospital.
"Awfully sporting of Mrs Desmond," was the verdict of grateful
subalterns, who found these tea-drinkings a vast improvement on stale
home papers, and half-hearted gambling at the Club. There was always
music. Honor, besides playing magnificently, could be safely relied
upon for impromptu accompaniments. The Chicken, and an irrepressible
Irishman of the Sikhs, who gloried in the name of O'Flanagan, were
indefatigable on the banjo, and in the construction of topical verses
to vary the programme. Hot-weather audiences are not hypercritical;
and in the red-hot circle of days and nights the mildest innovation is
welcome as a sail on a blank horizon.
Desmond himself was delighted with his wife's spontaneous contribution
to the good spirits of the station; and if the two had little quiet
time together, they had at least a satisfying sense of comradeship in
work; the strongest link that can be added to the strong chain of
marriage.
Frank Olliver, with her big smile, and infectious gaiety, looked in
most days, as a matter of course; till one of the two fever cases she
had managed to lay hands on took a serious turn, and an hour off duty
could only be secured when Honor insisted on relieving guard, and
sending Frank over to play hostess in her stead.
There was also little Mrs Peters, the only other wife in the station; a
square, shapeless cushion of a woman, who would rush in for a
breathless half-hour to pour tales of native cunning, and Eurasian
apathy into Desmond's sympathetic ears. Being both plump and
energetic, she suffered cruelly in the heat; mopped her face without
shame between her sentences; and, according to Frank Olliver, lived
chiefly on lime-squash, and a limitless admiration for her missionary
husband,--a large, ungainly man, with the manners of a shy schoolboy,
and the wrapt gaze of a seer; a man who, in an age of fanaticism, would
have walked smiling to the rack. As it was, he walked with no less
equanimity through the pestilential mazes of the city and bazaar. For
although in this age of tolerance run to seed, a man is not called upon
to die for his beliefs, he is occasionally called upon to live for
them; which is not necessarily the easier of the two. But up to his
lights Henry Peters achieved it. At all possible and impossible hours,
his unwieldy white umbrella, pith hat, and badly-cut drill suit
pervaded the dwellings of his scattered converts; while his wife, torn
between pride in him and mortal dread of infection, grieved in secret
over inadequate meals snatched at odd hours; and supplemented tremulous
prayers for his safety with lumps of camphor, screwed up in paper, and
slipped surreptitiously into the pockets of his coats.
Once or twice she dragged him in triumph to the Desmonds,--a reluctant
dishevelled hero,--and 'showed him off' to that little company of
well-groomed, kindly-natured soldiers, with a naive simplicity that
went to Honor's heart.
"Why is it that some of us have a special licence to be so exquisitely
natural?" she wondered, as she stood beside the tea-table, dispensing
iced coffee, and surveying, with satisfaction, a room full of
tobacco-smoke and contented men. "That's just how I feel tempted to
'show off' Theo, sometimes. And wouldn't the dear man crush me to
powder if I tried!"
She glanced approvingly at him where he sat astride on a reversed
chair, in dusty polo kit, reporting progress of the great 'fly
campaign' to Wyndham, who had been newly promoted to a deck-lounge in
the drawing-room at tea-time.
It was a larger gathering than usual; and, in spite of the fact that
for three days the thermometer had recorded a hundred and twenty in the
shade, spirits ran high. The subalterns--for whose exuberant fooling
Honor had a very tender tolerance--had 'chorussed' themselves hoarse
and thirsty; and were receiving the reward of the public-spirited out
of long misty tumblers, that fizzed and bubbled. Peters had forgotten
his shyness in a discussion with Norton on the vexed question of
cholera infection, and the probable futility of quarantine; while Mrs
Peters, listening anxiously, made inconsequent darts into the argument,
to her husband's obvious discomfiture, and Norton's equally obvious
amusement.
A group of men near Honor were talking of England, tormenting
themselves gratuitously by bare imagination of a feast. Captain Unwin
of the Sikhs was casually unfolding a plan to elude superfluous
creditors, and spend next summer 'at home.' His debts were phenomenal;
and it was six years since he had sighted the funnel of a steamer. He
expatiated yearningly on prospective delights. Cup Day at Ascot; a
July evening on the upper reaches of the Thames; a punt in a backwater;
a pipe and a cushion; just enough breeze to stir the willows; and, with
any luck, a pretty woman in the bows.
"Just a shade better than a sandbank on the Indus, eh?" he wound up
with a chuckle of enjoyment. "And I'll pull it through this time or
perish in the attempt! Lord . . . think of jingling down Piccadilly in
a hansom once again . . ."
"To dinner at the Savoy," suggested a thick-set Major on a note of
relish. "Devilish good one they gave me there three years ago. Night
before I sailed."
Sympathetic murmurs encouraged him to enlarge on the cherished memory!
but before he had reached the _entree_--an elaborate item--Honor was
out of hearing; having crossed the room to where Lenox sat balancing a
coffee-cup on one knee, watching the faces round him with keen, kindly
eyes, and taking little active part in the proceedings. He still wore
his arm in a sling; and his teeth held the inevitable pipe, filled from
a tin of tobacco that Desmond had induced him to accept on the night of
their talk. Only three times in the past week had he succumbed to the
forbidden mixture. But the glow of satisfaction, which those who have
never resisted unto blood, complacently couple with self-conquest, was
denied him. Restlessness, lack of sleep, constant recurrence of the
concussion headache,--these had been his reward; with the result that a
rising temperature had forced him to put his name on the 'sick-list'
and take a few days off duty. But at Honor's approach his whole face
lit up. The intimacy of everyday life had drawn them very near to each
other; for Honor had all the magnetism of a woman made for tenderness;
a magnetism few men can resist, and few women condone.
"You look so tired, and aloof from it all," she said gently. "I'm
afraid the boys' nonsense and noisiness worries your head."
"Not a bit of it. It's good to see them enjoying themselves. You're a
public benefactor, Mrs Desmond."
She laughed, and blushed.
"Nonsense. It's only so nice of them to come, when one can do so
little to amuse them. Do have some more coffee."
"Thanks. It's capital stuff. Dick's very late," he added anxiously.
"I'm wondering what's come to him."
He rose, and followed her to the tea-table, where Bobby Nixon saluted
with his most expansive smile; and announced that O'Flanagan,
reinforced by refreshment, was once more 'willing to oblige.'
An assurance that the rest were unanimously willing to listen brought
the Irishman to his feet, banjo in hand; a lank, clean-shaven
individual, who secreted a well-spring of humour beneath the
tragi-comic solemnity of the born-low comedian. He was greeted with
cries of "Fire away, old Flannel Jacket!" "Phil the Fluter's Ball!"
"An' give ut in shtyle!" He gave it in style accordingly, and in a
brogue as broad as his own shoulders; the whole room spontaneously
taking up the chorus.
"Wid the toot of the flute, an' the twiddle of the fiddle,
Dancin' in the middle, like a herring on a griddle!
Up an' down, hands come round, cross into the wall--
Faith, hadn't we the gaietee . . ."
But at this point the door opened to admit Max Richardson. He was
still in uniform; and there was that in his face which checked their
hilarity, and made O'Flanagan instantly put down his banjo.
Honor went quickly towards him, holding out her hand.
"What is it?" she asked in a low tone.
"It's young Hodson. He died . . . half an hour ago."
"Not cholera?"
Dick nodded.
An inarticulate murmur went round the room; and for several seconds no
one spoke. The first white man down seemed to bring the enemy within
striking distance of each one of them.
Then Lenox came forward. "You'll excuse us, Mrs Desmond?" he said
quietly. And the two men went out, leaving a strangely silent room
behind them.
They passed through the hall into the dining-room before Lenox took the
pipe from his lips, and spoke.
"Bad business," he remarked laconically. "And, God forgive me, when he
'went sick' this morning I half thought he was malingering. Poor
chap . . . he's quit of the Frontier sooner than he thought for,
without any help from me. You were with him, I suppose, . . . at the
last?"
"Yes; for the best part of two hours," Dick answered, absently helping
himself to a cheroot. "Never saw a man take it harder. No getting him
to make a fight for it. Kept on begging me to tell him if this show
was fellow's only chance; and . . . I couldn't."
Lenox looked intently at his friend.
"That so?"
The other nodded; and there was a short silence. Richardson took up a
photograph of old Sir John Meredith, and examined it with critical
interest.
"You might have sent for Peters," Lenox said at length,
"No earthly use. He swore like a trooper when I suggested it; and I
can't blame him. Professional platitudes are not the style of physic
to ease a man when he's suffering hell's own torments in his mind and
body." He set down the picture abruptly, and swung round on his heel.
"I'll be going on now, for a tub, and a change of clothing. Idiotic of
me, no doubt; but I feel a bit off colour after all that. How about
the funeral? To-night?"
"No. First thing to-morrow. I'll arrange it with Peters before he
leaves; and get Courtenay to let me off the sick-list, if I can." Then
grasping the younger man's shoulder with rough kindliness, he added:
"Good old Dick. Pull yourself together, and come back here for dinner.
It may be my turn . . . or yours, before we're through. And if it
is . . . we don't go out like snuffed candles, remember. You may take
my word for it."
"Hope to God you're right," the other answered between his teeth, and
was gone.
Next morning, in a flaming dawn, all that remained of Tom Hodson was
consigned, with military honours, to the dust of that Frontier he had
grown to hate, because it demands so much of a man, and offers so
little in return; and every house within earshot of the cemetery
vibrated to the three parting volleys fired over the open grave.
Lenox was present at the service; and at the gun practice that followed
shortly after it. Thirty grains of phenacetin and several forbidden
pipes, had ensured him six hours' sleep, and a cooler skin; with the
result that he had successfully induced an amused medical officer to
report him 'fit for duty.' But Nature is relentless; and Lenox,
driving back from 'orderly room' through a white-hot glare, and a haze
of pungent dust, found himself speculating vaguely--as though the
question concerned some unknown entity in another world--how he was
going to drag a protesting body and brain through the rest of the day's
work.
"Got to be done somehow, though. That's flat," was his final verdict
as he passed into the twilight of the hall.
Every door in the house was shut against the furnace without; had been
shut since seven of the morning; and would so remain till after sunset.
Yet, the mercury hovered between ninety-seven and a hundred all day,
and most of the night. In India the thermometer supersedes the
barometer; and in the hot weather it becomes an obsession. There is
always a mild satisfaction in knowing exactly what one has endured.
Desmond was not yet back, and the study was empty; a friendly-looking
room, its simple haphazard furniture unified by the rich colour
harmonies of Indian carpets and curtains; while a liberal supply of
books, unusual for the country, proclaimed it the room of a soldier who
found time for study and thought.
Too weary to get out of uniform, Lenox laid aside his helmet and
accoutrements; shouted to the punkah coolie, sleeping in the verandah,
chin on chest; sorted his geographical papers, and sat down to the
table. Then he took out his pipe, eyed it thoughtfully, and flung it
aside with a curse. Each relapse resulted in a renewed access of
self-distrust; and this morning the cloud upon his spirit fell heavier
than ever, because he foresaw that if the work ahead of him were to be
pulled through, in the teeth of the grinding headaches consequent on
his fall, last night's programme must be repeated, not once, but many
times, And at that rate, what was to be the end of it? The degradation
of submitting to the drug itself? A thousand times, no. The soldier
in him sprang to arms at the mere suggestion. Like all men capable of
greatness, he believed, not in the mastery of circumstance, but in the
mastery of will. Yet, unhappily, the will, like all spiritual forces,
is ignominiously dependent on bodily conditions. Pain, sheer pitiless
pain, will have its way with the bravest of us.
The man was ill without realising it. The nerves in his head throbbed
to a devil's hornpipe of their own, and mental effort was beyond him.
In vain he contracted his heavy brows, and tried to gather up the
threads of the chapter he had been working at. Black depression
overpowered him, obliterating rational thought. The morning's service
haunted him with unnatural persistence, and the half-hour he had spent
with Dick in the dead boy's bungalow, looking through his papers--a
chaos of bills, mostly unpaid; racing notes; old programmes; and half a
dozen envelopes addressed in a girl's unformed hand. On the open
blotter, an unfinished letter to a friend in Simla had announced his
hope of a speedy exchange down country! his determination not to spend
another hot weather 'on this God-forsaken Frontier . . .'
"Poor misguided chap," Lenox mused, not without a tinge of his old
contempt. "Now if only _I_ could have gone in his place, it would have
simplified matters all round."
But he thrust away the thought as morbid and cowardly; and by way of
curative drew Quita's last letter out of his breast-pocket. The fact
of her love for him still remained a miracle incompletely realised; and
she had been right in her belief that he had yet to discover its
intensity and depth.
The great noontide silence had already fallen upon house and compound.
Outside, brazen earth and brazen sky glared at one another with
malignant intensity. Two bullocks lounged under the bananas by the
mill wheel flicking lazy tails when the flies presumed too shamelessly
upon their apathy; and crows, with beaks agape, hopped resignedly from
one burning patch of shade to another. Among the verandah roof-beams,
three grey squirrels argued, with subdued chitterings, over a kipper's
head stolen from a breakfast plate; and at intervals a piteous wailing
came from the servants' quarters, where, as all knew, Nizam Din,
kitmutgar, was beating his pretty wife, Miriam Bibi, for the third time
that week, because she had grown careless in the matter of covering her
face, since the coming of Zyarulla, whose arrogant magnificence had
created a flutter in more than one respectable household.
But Quita's letter, written in her 'garden' on a boulder, before
breakfast, had transported Lenox many hundred miles away from it all.
The cluttering of squirrels, and the cries of poor Miriam Bibi entered
his ears; but the spirit of him was back among the mountains; the scent
of warm pine-needles was is his nostrils, the spell of his wife's face
and voice upon his heart.
A sudden sense of suffocation dispelled the dream. He found himself
breathless, in a bath of perspiration. The punkah had stopped dead.
And one must have endured this trifling inconvenience to gauge the
significance of those five words.
Lenox straightened himself with an oath. "_Kencho_.[1] . . . you son
of a jackal!" he thundered; at the same time jerking the punkah frill,
an effective means of reanimating the long-suffering punkah coolie, who
has a trick of twisting the rope round his arm, that he may jerk it the
more easily in his dreams.
But Lenox's vigorous pull merely brought a great length of rope through
the wall; and his command was answered by the groans of a man in
torment. Springing up, he wrenched open the glass door; and a blast as
from a furnace struck him across the face. The coolie, a brown,
distorted mass, writhed upon the hot stones in mortal agony. At the
Sahib's approach, he struggled to his knees with a rush of incoherent
detail; while Lenox shouted for Zyarulla, and the dogcart; flung a word
of encouragement to the stricken man, and went in again for his helmet.
Till the trap appeared Lenox paced the verandah; the punkah coolie
groaned; and Zyarulla protested as openly as he dared against his Sahib
being put to personal inconvenience for a base-born--mere dust of the
earth. None the less, at the Sahib's order he gingerly helped the dust
of the earth into the trap, where Lenox put his one available arm round
the writhing body; and the _sais_, who showed small relish for the
situation, was ordered to get up and drive from behind. The which he
did; leaning over the back seat, and keeping ostentatiously clear of
the misbegotten son of a pig who had broken his midday sleep.
In this fashion they journeyed, awkwardly enough, to the temporary
cholera hospital; a handful of tents and grass huts on the outskirts of
the station. Betwixt the clutches of cramp, and the abject humility of
his kind, the coolie slithered from the seat on to the mat; and Lenox
had some ado to prevent his falling headlong from the cart. But in due
time he was handed over safely to a suave, coffee-coloured hospital
assistant, and carried shrieking into a tent crammed with sights unfit
to be told; whence he emerged, two hours later, without protest of
voice or limb, to swell the intermittent stream of fellow-corpses that
flowed from the hospital to the burning ghatt or the Mahommedal
burial-ground outside the station.
When Lenox staggered back into the hall, dizzy with headache, and
half-blinded with glare, he was met by Desmond, who, noticing a slight
lurch as he entered, took hold of his arm.
"Zyarulla told me what happened," he said, a great gentleness in his
voice. "Come on to your room, old man. Take a rousing dose of
phenacetin, and lie down till tiffin. I'll bring you a lime-squash."
"Thanks. You are a damned good sort, Desmond. The sun's touched me
up, I fancy. I shall be all right in a couple at hours."
But before two hours were out, Desmond's orderly was speeding through
the dust to the Doctor Sahib's house; and Desmond himself had gone
hurriedly to his wife's room, where she too was lying down after her
morning's duties. She rose at his coming, holding out both hands. For
she read disaster in his eyes.
"Darling, what has gone wrong?"
"It's Lenox. He's down with it. Not severe as yet. But there's no
mistaking what it is."
Her faint colour--it had grown perceptibly fainter in the past
week--left her face.
"Oh, his poor wife! We must send a wire at once."
"I've sent one already, by the orderly who went for Courtenay. Told
her she should have news every day, for the present."
"Oh, bless you, Theo! You think of everything!"
"Steady, Honor, steady," he rebuked her gently. "We've got to do a
fair share of thinking between us just now. Paul can safely stay on if
one isolates that side of the house; and Zyarulla and I can do
everything for Lenox between us. As for you, John must give you a bed
till we're through."
"But, Theo . . ."
"Be quiet!" he broke in almost roughly; adding on a changed note: "For
once in a way, my dearest, you will obey orders without question--or go
altogether. Now give me the chlorodyne, and let me get back to poor
Lenox. Seems brutal to give him any form of opium after all he's been
through. Hullo, there's Richardson shouting outside. He'll be
terribly cut up when he knows."
It transpired that Richardson had come over, post-haste, to report
three cases among his men; and at sun-down the little mountain battery,
with its three subalterns and full camp equipment, marched out into the
open desert, scornfully overlooked by that Pisgah height of the
Frontier, the Takti Suliman, whose square-cut crags were printed in
sharp outline upon a stainless sky.
[1] Pull.