"In a hundred ages of the gods I could not tell thee of the glory of
Himachal. As the dew is dried up by the sun, so are the sins of
mankind, by the glory of Himachal."--_From the Hindu_.
That night Eldred Lenox slept long, and dreamlessly; and awoke with new
life throbbing in his veins. The three uneventful days that followed
were among the happiest in his life; and on the fourth, before sunset,
the two women set out, in hospital doolies, on their primitive journey
to Sheik Budeen.
Honor had protested, almost to tears, at being compelled to spend a
fortnight with her heart in two places, and her body in a third! But
Desmond, reinforced by John Meredith, had held his own; promising to
escort her to the barren Rock of Refuge, whose only virtue was its
elevation; and, by arranging a relay of ponies along the route, gallop
back in time for 'orderly room' next morning. "Which is more than nine
husbands out of ten would do for a headstrong wife!" Meredith had
concluded, stroking her flushed cheek: and thus the matter had been
settled.
Lenox and Quita spent the last afternoon together in their own
bungalow, at her suggestion. The officious chowkidar unearthed two
punkah coolies for the occasion: and the planning of their future home,
a picnic tea served on Eldred's writing-table, and practical
considerations in respect of furniture and house linen--though Quita
had small inherent regard for either!--helped, more or less, to obscure
the thought of separation. Before leaving the bungalow, she won
through the dreaded last injunctions and kisses without ignominious
collapse, since Lenox was to ride out for a few miles beside the
doolie; and they parted finally with brave words, and a prolonged
hand-clasp that left her fingers tingling for a good five minutes
afterwards.
Quita never forgot that journey. Its weird fascination, clashing with
the ache of parting, stamped every detail indelibly upon her
memory;--the vast, featureless plain, empty as a widow's heart; the
lavish moonlight poured out upon it like water, flowing unhindered to
the naked spurs of the frontier hills, whose huge shoulders, peaks, and
escarpments blotted out the stars along the western horizon; the
occasional appearance of wild-looking Waziri militia-men, from the
chain of outposts along the foothills, who had been warned to keep up a
sharp look-out along the road: no villages; no trees; no sound or
movement anywhere, save the distorted shadows and rythmical grunting of
her doolie-bearers, the soft shuffling of their feet, and the click of
hoofs, as Desmond rode at a foot's pace beside his wife, or
dismounting, walked and talked with her, his bridle slung over his arm.
The suggestion of tenderness and companionship in their low tones
seemed to accentuate the lifeless desolation through which they moved,
the blankness and uncertainty of the anxious months ahead. Possibly
something of this occurred to Desmond; for after the first few miles he
deserted his wife now and again, and walked by Quita; exorcising the
spirit of self-torment that haunts the imaginative, as he of all men
best knew how to do.
Finally, lulled by the movement of the doolie, she fell asleep; and
awoke to find herself in a changed world; a world of rough-cut volcanic
rock and boulder, piled up on either hand in fantastic disarray; a
world of white light and sharp black shadows; of mystery, and terror,
and uncanny beauty. It was as if she had been transported back to the
morning of Time, when the earth giants wrenched up the mountains, and
pelted one another in pure sport: and as she flung back the loose flap
of her doolie to get a wider view of it all, Desmond trotted up to her.
"It's less alarming than it looks," he reassured her. "We have only
turned off into the Paizu Pass. It's a nasty dangerous bit of road;
but our own men are on ahead, so we're safe enough. We shall be
climbing the hill directly; and I'll be uncommonly glad of my _chota
hazri_."
"You deserve it, you poor fellow! But it sounds an anachronism! I
can't believe that anything so commonplace as a bungalow, with servants
and tea and toast, exists within a hundred miles of this primeval
nakedness."
But in the fulness of time, bungalow, tea, and servants were all
forthcoming: and between three and four of the morning their fantastic
journey culminated in a prosaic meal of eggs and buttered toast. When
it was over Quita vanished, leaving Desmond alone with his wife; and
before moonset he was speeding back along the road they had come;
covering the fifty miles at a hand-gallop, in something less than five
hours.
A fortnight later two very unwilling grass-widows were rescued by
Lenox, who had secured his sick leave; and who escorted them from Dera
Ishmael as far as Lahore, where he left them to go on into the mountain
region beyond Kashmir.
Hillmen have a saying, 'Who goes to the hills goes to his mother'; and
Eldred Lenox, a hillman both by love and lineage, confirmed it for the
hundredth time, as he pushed his way upward, by leisurely enchanting
stages, from the steaming Punjab, through the great natural gateway of
the Baramullah Pass, a towering defile, thunderous with full-fed
torrents and waterfalls, into the familiar Valley, . . a very sanctuary
of peace; its terraced slopes splashed with the vivid green of
rice-fields, the russet and gold of ripe orchards and cornlands; up
through Srinagar, 'the City of the Sun,' of carved and gilded temples,
thronged waterways, and flat house-tops blazoned with flowers; and yet
again upward, by ways well known to him, into the hidden mysteries of
the mountains massed about the valleys; a mighty conclave of immortals
brooding in majestic meditation; shrouded at this season by dazzling
continents of cloud; and plunging green arms to the rivers and lakes,
that gleamed like molten silver under a pale sky.
To know a character rightly it should be seen in its natural element;
and the Lenox of the Himalayas was by no means the same man as the
Lenox of the Plains. All his latent energy and vigour blossomed out
like flowers at the first whisper of spring. 'The glory of Himachal'
drew and penetrated and inspired him like nothing else on earth.
Here he tracked and brought down oonyal, markhor, and the great
mountain sheep; explored on a small scale, because the fever of going
was upon him; and slept as a man only sleeps when he is living close to
the heart of Nature. Here, also,--fortified by solitude, by the
uplifting sense of things awful and divine which is the gift of great
mountains to those who love them,--he fought doggedly and
systematically against a craving that persisted in spite of improved
health. For the tyranny of opium is as tenacious as it is deadly; and
the habit of five years is not to be broken in as many weeks. But the
man who wills to conquer evil has God and Nature fighting on his side:
and in the teeth of several flagrant lapses, Lenox made steady progress.
In Srinagar he bought a bottle of chlorodyne; and two days later flung
it down the _khud_. When his store of drugged tobacco ran out, he
replaced it by a brand in which an innocuous admixture of opium just
sufficed to produce the faint fragrance that he loved. The black fits
of melancholy, which were native to his temperament, and which, in the
past five years, had threatened to dominate him permanently, evaporated
like morning fogs before the sun as the certainty grew in him that he
must prevail: and Quita, who had done most of the harm, made
unconscious reparation by letters whose consummate faith in the final
issue was stimulating as the mountain air itself.
By October he was back at Dera Ishmael Khan;--a renewed man, bronzed
and vigorous, the shadow gone from his eyes; testing his achievement
and finding that it held good; bending all his energies to the task of
fitting up a home for his wife; a task whereof Honor usurped as large a
share as he would permit. Then, towards the end of the month, he wrote
to Quita: "Come. We are ready, and waiting for you,--the house,
Zyarulla, Brutus, and your impatient husband, who will pick you up at
Lahore."
And on the last day of October, more than six years after their hasty
wedding, Eldred and Quita Lenox entered upon their married life.
"Have you forgotten, darling, the nonsense I talked that day about the
House, and the Enchanted Palace?" she asked, as they stood together on
their first evening in the drawing-room, whose every detail he had
planned with elaborate care.
"Is it likely? Why?"
His arm was round her shoulders; and putting up one hand she touched
his face.
"Why . . because I said we would have to begin with the House. But we
seem to have reached the Enchanted Palace before starting after all?"
"By a very roundabout route," he answered, a suspicion of the old
sadness in his eyes.
"Yes; but we _have_ reached it. That's the main point, dear Pessimist;
and the commonplace House I offered you has tumbled into a dust-heap of
ruins. Don't let's build it up again, whatever else we may do in the
way of foolishness. Retrogression is the one unforgiveable sin!"
It is the instinctive cry of love in the first flush of fulfilment.
The grand impulsion of man to woman brushes aside lesser considerations
like so many flies. But Life and Temperament, standing discreetly in
the background, will have their say in the 'fateful second act' of the
human comedy before the curtain drops.