her own, cold with the damp of the mist, and then he drew her nearer to
the waters. "Come on, dear," he said brokenly.
They could feel the tide creeping around their feet, and it came up
almost to the woman’s knees. Still she clung, struggling, panting, to
his hand, as he led her into the deeper waters. Once she brought his
hand that was leading her up to her face, and he felt her lips upon it.
"I love you," she said clearly, and the words pierced the mist, reaching
him.
"Come on, dear," he said again, and still brokenly, leading her to where
the tide ran swiftest.
The waters were up to her waist, and she was chilled and benumbed, and
her clothes dragged on her, and she was weary with the weariness of
death, but she did not know it. She still clung to his hand. And then
as the waters grew deeper:
"Will it hurt?" she asked, and when he did not answer her, "There! I am
not afraid."
Her voice was stronger than he had ever heard it, and sweeter; but the
strength and the sweetness of it, were like crushing weights upon his
heart and brain. She could speak so—when the waters were growing
deeper! Moisture not of the mist or the sea sprang to his face and
bathed it. And then the agony her words had caused—lifted. She did
love him then; loved him with a deathless courage. Let the waters cover
them, and the mist draw the folds of its mantle over the level sea!
Suddenly he stopped and lifted his head, breathing quickly.
"The ground’s higher," he cried. "We’ve reached it—the mainland!"
She did not call back to him, but she placed her free hand over his that
held hers, and he could feel the added pressure of thanksgiving.
Little by little they could feel the waters receding. Now they were
down to his knees again; now they were at his feet—conquered.
He drew her into his arms and he called her by name. She did not
answer.
"Aren’t you going to speak to me?" he asked, bending over her.
She stroked the shoulder of his coat slowly with her cold, wet hand.
"I—I—what must I say?"
"What I have been waiting all these years to hear—what you said a little
while ago—that you love me," he answered, looking into her face.
She bent her head and laid her cheek against her hand on his shoulder.
"I do," she said. "I love you—" her voice broke.
He waited.
"I love you," she repeated, clinging to him. "I have loved you for
months. I have been foolish for you! I have been frightened to have
you out of my sight; to have you do anything when I was not along for
fear you would get hurt in some way! I’ve imagined all kinds of things
that could happen to you—I am so foolish—I love—"
The words came up to him, choked, and he had to lean closer over her to
hear.
She faltered, lifting her face from her hands.
"_Yes?_"
"I dreamed last night you were at the Dargai Hill—that you were killed,
and I awoke sobbing in the darkness. I am—so foolish. I knew it wasn’t
true—" she turned her face away and wiped her eyes.
"And you love me—like that?" he asked slowly.
Behind them the tide crept in, covering portions of the peninsula and
all of the narrow neck. Around them the mist lay heavy.
"But you were not frightened a little while ago and you were in danger
then."
She shook her head.
"No; I was with you—we were together," she answered him simply.
He stroked her damp hair, unconscious alike of the tide and the mist,
drinking in her words thirstily.
"Then it isn’t Robert!" he said more to himself than to her.
"No," she said again. "I think it has been you always—and I didn’t know
it. I think I have been waiting for you always. Robert showed me that
it was you!"
He was silent, waiting for her to go on.
"If it hadn’t been for your danger when you were ill from the wound, I
mightn’t have ever known. And if you’d been at the Dargai Hill—" she
stopped and stretched out her arms, and put them around his neck, and
looked into his eyes. "Oh! I couldn’t have borne that! I’m selfish,
but I couldn’t have spared you even for the Service!"
The vision of the desolate years he had planned and thought of—the years
devoid of service—and the memory of the useless uniforms, hidden away,
and the sabres, useless too, crossed on the wall at home, faded, and he
laid the dead memories at her feet.
"This compensates—" he broke off, kissing her in silence.
After awhile he drew her arm through his and started to walk slowly.
"You must get home and get on dry clothes," he said.
And he helped her up the steep embankment and into the road that led
home.
The tide reached its flood and turned. The sea’s low song came to them
muffled by distance, and was lost in the darkness behind them. The heavy
mist lifted slowly, and through the rifts, one by one, the stars
appeared, peeping down at them like little children peeping from the
coverings of their cribs; and by and by the moon stole from behind a
cloud and moved slowly between the twinkling stars, as a nurse steals
from behind a shadowy curtain and moves softly from bed to bed, to see
if the children sleep.
He led her in silence through the great wrought-iron gates and up the
drive, toward the lighted house, looking down into her uplifted face
with his grave eyes.
And he kept looking at her all during dinner. Once she looked across at
him—and smiled.
Later she complained of being tired, and she rose to go to bed. Stewart
lighted her candle and waited for her at the foot of the stairs, after
the fine old custom of his people. Not even Malcolm Stewart, as the
elder host, ever thought of lighting Cary’s candle.
Stewart handed it to her as she came up to the great stairway and
stopped. To-night he did not offer to shake hands.
She took the candle and then slipped by him quickly. He called her
back.
"Aren’t you going to say ’good-night’ to me?" he asked, a smile creeping
around his mouth.
"Why—yes. Good-night."
He leaned over her and kissed her.
"Good-night," he said, and his voice was suddenly grave. "I hope your
dreams will be sweet."
She sighed—a sigh of happiness, and she looked down at the burning taper
in her hand.
"Then they will have to be of you."
She did not speak for a moment; afterwards she lifted her eyes from the
burning taper and looked into his.
"I love you," she said again, and she repeated the words over and over
as a master plays over and over a bar of sweetest music, and she put out
her hand and pressed her fingers against his cheek. They rested
there—closely—for a minute. "I love you so!"
Then she gathered up her long silk skirts and began slowly to mount the
stairs, the taper lifted carefully before her. She did not look back,
but he could see her face, even in the shadow of the grim armor, by its
light. And on her white face there rested a perfect peace. Once a
draught caught the flickering taper and nearly extinguished it. She
stopped and, dropping her long skirts that fell back upon the oaken
stairs with a silken rustle, she shielded the taper with her hand. So
would she shield the light of her pure life and her wifehood from the
world’s breath, he thought.
He stood leaning against the bannister, watching her until she vanished,
and he stood there after the soft silken rustle of her skirts and her
faint footfall were lost, staring at the last turn in the stairs.
And in western Scotland, Trevelyan sat, his head bowed upon the letter
he had just finished to Cary.
*XII.*
It was spring before Trevelyan could push forward into the lowland
section, and on to the interior and Mackenzie. The reports of a
threatened cholera scare had reached down as far as Patna. There were
Britons coming every day from farther inland to Patna, grateful enough
for the privilege of having passed the government line of precaution,
and being allowed to stay there; but a British subject, who was neither
ordered there by command of the War or Colonial Offices, was another
matter, and Trevelyan was regarded with a blank curiosity by those who
knew his proposed destination.
There were a good many technicalities and difficulties to be surmounted,
too, in the question of getting inward as far as the precaution lines,
that would have discouraged anyone less determined than Trevelyan. It
had seemed simple enough—to get there—after the journey had once been
begun, but the actual reaching Mackenzie was another matter.
The delay, under which he fretted inexpressibly, only brought more
serious accounts of the spread of the disease. A score of natives had
sickened and died—traced directly to the foulness of the water used—and
later there were contradictory reports as to the appearance of the
scourge within the barracks. The waiting days became a torture to
Trevelyan, and it was not until he had scaled the wall of obstacles, and
was well on the other side, pressing onward to Mackenzie, that the
torture lifted. The fear—half formed and never acknowledged—of possibly
not getting to Mackenzie, fell from him as mile after mile took him
further from Patna and nearer to the garrison, and once or twice he
laughed a little as he kept picturing to himself Mackenzie’s surprise at
this personal answering of his letter.
There were other pictures that would force themselves on him at this
time, but he fought them from him with a strength grown with much usage.
There were pictures of Cary’s face—white with the whiteness of the moon
upon it and sweeter than the fairest flower—there were pictures of home
and old Mactier, mourning for him, and visions of the sea beating
against the high, gray crags. It seemed to him he could hear and see it
even then, inland as he was, until he would force himself back to
present things and the desolate waste land through which he was
journeying; the stricken section to which he was going; the cholera and
Mackenzie. And he would hold his wandering thoughts sternly in check,
as years ago he had held in check the stallion he had conquered and was
wont to ride. And so the day would pass in a desperate struggle against
self, or his desire to press onward to Mackenzie.
It had needed all his powers of eloquence; all his strategy; all the
hard discipline of repression taught by the Woolwich years, to get him
so far on his journey, and he had thought with a certain grim
satisfaction that all the Woolwich years were paying back their debt to
him, at last.
It was early in the morning when he reached the small inland Station.
His presence caused a good deal of comment among the troopers he passed
on his way to Mackenzie and the improvised hospital that had been
erected a long distance from the barracks. The whole thing was strange;
the new faces that he met; the awful sense of a growing horror that
brooded like a bird of prey over the Station with its handful of
men—placed out here by order of government officials far away and safe
enough in London—struggling against the threatened devastation to the
ranks.
He found Mackenzie in the small ill-constructed apothecary shop and he
stood still a minute, studying his friend’s haggard face and heavy eyes,
before the surgeon was aware of his presence. Mackenzie was weighing
morphia, and three times Trevelyan saw his hand shake and spill the
white powder before he was able to divide it in correct proportions.
"Mackenzie," he said evenly, not wishing to startle him.
The surgeon turned sharply and looked at him. Then he leaned against
the table, his back to it, his hands gripping its edge. He leaned
forward a little, frowning. He had had a hard night of it, but—
"Mackenzie—it’s I—Trevelyan. Don’t you remember me?"
Trevelyan went forward.
Mackenzie’s long, lean fingers suddenly relaxed their grip on the edge,
and he sat back against the table.
"Good heavens!" he said, slowly.
Trevelyan went up and slapped him on the shoulder.
"I got your letter and it just stirred up my fighting blood. I packed
my grip—and, presto! here I am."
Mackenzie was silent.
"Come; haven’t you anything to say to a chap who has been traveling
thousands of miles to get here? Aren’t you glad to see me?"
"_Glad to see you?_" Mackenzie lifted his haggard eyes from the floor to
Trevelyan’s face, "_Glad to see you_—in this pest house? You’re the
maddest fool God ever made!"
Trevelyan drew down the corners of his mouth.
"Perhaps I am," he said, "but I’ve come; and I’ve come to stay."
Mackenzie laid a heavy hand on his shoulder and Trevelyan could feel the
pressure of the long thin fingers through his coat.
"You are not going to stay one hour," he said, in a low voice,
"not—one—hour; do you hear? There’re new cases breaking out every day;
it’s going to play the devil! If you’re thinking of suicide, go back to
London and blow your brains out, or throw yourself into the
Thames—that’s more romantic, still. There’s nothing romantic about dying
of cholera. It isn’t a pretty way to die!" Mackenzie laughed, harshly.
Trevelyan put his hand up to his shoulder and forced away Mackenzie’s
grip.
"I’m not hunting suicide or death either," he said briefly, "and I’m not
mad. I know perfectly why I’m here—and what I’m here for, and I’m going
to stay." He paused a moment and then went on hurriedly, forcing back
the tension in his voice. "Do you think I’ve been traveling and
squandering money for weeks, and ’pulling strings’ to get here, and
being delayed at Patna, to be turned back now like a whipped boy turned
out of school?"
"But you don’t know what it’s like—"
"I guess I’ll find out quick enough. Look at you—ready to drop, and
then refusing help!"
Mackenzie put his hand up wearily to his forehead and pressed it there
tightly. The lines cut by lack of sleep on his haggard face relaxed a
little.
"It’s nothing. I’ll be all right when I’ve gotten some sleep. You’re
not needed. There’s Clarke, and the orderlies—" he broke off.
"Yes?"
Mackenzie bit his cheek and brought down his hand heavily on the table.
"I don’t need you. Will you go?"
"No."
Mackenzie turned and went back to the morphia scales. Something in the
work he was doing and the way he was doing it struck Trevelyan.
"Where’s the apothecary?" he asked briefly.
Mackenzie balanced the scales carefully.
"Sick," he said.
"Where’s Clarke?"
Mackenzie added a fraction of morphia to the scales.
"Sick," he said.
"And the helpers—the orderlies?"
Mackenzie put down the scales, suddenly, and stared at them.
"Half sick," he said.
*XIII.*
The long days crept slowly by at the Station and through the infected
district. as horses driven by Death, mercilessly, tired by their task,
and yet urged on continually to break through the breastwork of care and
precaution raised by Mackenzie and Trevelyan, so that the course of
their charioteer might sweep onward to the outlying districts and turn
the scourge, local as yet, into a devastating epidemic.
"Anything to keep the barracks clear of it," Trevelyan had thought and
said, and Mackenzie, grown silent with the effort of the fight, nodded
without speaking, forcing away from him the remembrance of the epidemic
he himself had been through, and the stories once told him by his
father, who had helped beat back the scourge on the Ganges in ’63.
Each hour was freighted with unspeakable horrors, and Trevelyan learned
to know the course of the disease almost as well as Mackenzie himself.
He knew the first symptoms; he knew with an instinct that rarely failed,
just the cases that were liable to pull through, and those that were
liable not to; he could foretell the signs of the _collapse_, when the
face would become cold and gray, the finger tips and lips and nose
livid; the eyes deeply sunk and bloodshot with the dark rings beneath;
the breath without any sensible warmth when caught on the hand; the
scarcely audible beating of the heart;—the apathy that was itself a
death.
The haunting shadow of his crime was driven back and back by the
absorbing matter of the hour, and even Cary’s face—moon-kissed—seemed
indistinct and far away, as he went about his tasks. It seemed
developed on a plate, hidden in the dark room—the innermost recesses of
his soul—to be produced and worshipped now and then when courage
weakened and the heart languished and grew sick.
He would recall it, at night sometimes, when he had flung himself down
for a few hours of rest, and he would press his fingers over his eyes as
though to hide from sight the memories of the day’s horrors and the
day’s deaths, and the face would come to him then, and his soul would
look upon it as on some dream of heaven.
And then the memory of her face would fade, and he would let it slip
away from him, as though knowing it had no place here—midst the cholera
scourge, and he would fall off to sleep and sleep exhaustedly.
The days held but one purpose, but one thought—his service to the men,
and he sometimes wondered how even the service of the hour had a power
to hold him, stronger than the memory of her face.
In those days, when each morning saw another man added to the inmates of
the hospital, it was all reality—grim, terrible and as strong as the
death he fought; and he and Death kept on the fight, and even when Death
won, his triumph seemed petty and incomplete because of this man’s
courage, which he could neither break nor bend.
It was when Death had seemingly withdrawn his presence a little way that
Mackenzie, one morning motioned to Trevelyan to come outside to the
entrance of the hospital. He spoke to the point—a necessity taught him
long ago when he had first joined the army and helped fight the Asiatic
scourge for the men.
"Five cases have broken out ten miles in-country. You know what that
means—a general mowing down and spread of the disease unless it is
strangled right away! I can’t leave the men here, or go any distance
from the barracks for fear—"
Trevelyan looked at him squarely and nodded.
"Of course not, and you want me to go?"
"Clarke isn’t fit yet, and I couldn’t let him go anyway. Could you go?"
"Sure."
"And take charge of things? I’ll send you some helpers, and perhaps run
over for an afternoon later to see how you’re getting on."
"All right. When am I to start?"
"Could you go to-day—now?"
Trevelyan brought his hand up to his forehead suddenly in the old
salute, a shadow of a smile in his eyes.
"Yes, sir."
Mackenzie looked away and stood silent a moment.
"It hardly seems as though I could spare you," and then quickly, "You
understand about the calomel and how to use it?"
"Yes."
"And Trevelyan—"
Trevelyan stopped suddenly as he was walking away, and turned.
"Well?"
"And just when the morphia’s needed, and when it’s judicious to give the
opium, calomel and white sugar—and about the salt injections in the
veins?"
"Yes."
"And Trevelyan—"
Trevelyan wheeled around, stopping short again. Mackenzie was still
looking away.
"Well?"
"And, for God’s sake, be careful!"
*XIV.*
It was one thing to help fight the scourge with Mackenzie in the
military hospital, crude as it was, where things were carried on with a
certain nicety and regard to military discipline that was stronger than
even the demoralizing dread of the hour; but it was another matter to
fight it, and crush it, and stamp it out, alone, in the midst of half a
hundred panic stricken natives, who knew neither military discipline nor
paid proper attention to the precautionary measures of the disease.
Trevelyan had never possessed the quality of conciliation; it had been
either one side of the line or the other. He had always reduced things
to their smallest denomination at once, with no intermediate measures.
And the quality became now a practical and living thing, as he forced
the natives to bow before him in obedience, and brought order out of
chaos.
It was not altogether the exact application of the military organization
learned at Woolwich, or the inspiration of the rally he had dreamed of,
that would fire his men, he told himself grimly, as he worked among
these people, but it answered for it, and it brought them into
subjection to his will.
He held them in control, as the pilot holds in control the ship he
steers, guiding it through the madness of the gale, and they never
dreamed of mutiny, because they feared him more than they feared the
cholera.
And by and by when they saw that he held the scourge in check, his hand
upon its throat, they fell down before him in all the pitifulness of
ignorance and superstition, as before a being mightier than they had
ever conceived of, worshiping him. But they were at his feet always.
Mackenzie, shrewd and silent-tongued, took in the situation at a glance,
when he rode over for an afternoon, a fortnight later, to see how
Trevelyan was getting on.
"He’s the biggest man I ever knew," he said to himself as he followed
the orderly who was leading him to Trevelyan.
He found Trevelyan stooping over the small rigid figure of a native
baby, his hand still resting on the tiny wrist where the pulse had just
stopped its slow beating.
Mackenzie came in and stood on the other side of the child, and
Trevelyan raised his head. He showed no surprise at Mackenzie being
there. In his face was all the unutterableness of the horror; in his
voice was all the passionate protest, all the crushing dread, all the
grief, that he had never shown before.
"_It—is—awful!_"
Mackenzie nodded.
"Yes," he said.
*XV.*
Three weeks later, when it seemed as though the battle had been won,
Trevelyan got a hasty scrawl from Mackenzie.
It had been carried by a man of the regiment, who had ridden the ten
miles on a dead run, and now stood exhausted before Trevelyan, his face
twitching with the fright born of the tidings he had brought.
Trevelyan took the note in silence and he looked hard at the man’s face
before he opened the message. Then he bent his head and forced the
paper open, still without comment.
"Eight cases broken out in barracks. If you can leave—come.
Mackenzie."
He crushed the note in his hand.
"My respects to Dr. Mackenzie," he said quietly, raising his head and
meeting the eyes of the trooper, "and I will be with him to-night."
He spent the morning in arranging matters and leaving orders with his
chief helper, who was to remain for a time, more as a precautionary
measure than for anything else, and then made his own scant preparations
in haste to get to Mackenzie before nightfall.
He had thought first of slipping away, fearful of what the knowledge of
his going might bring, but the more he thought of it the more he put the
idea from him. After all the truth was the wisest.
He called all those of the half hundred natives together who had been
spared of the scourge—most of whom he had fought death for, and he
addressed them in Hindostanee. He spoke to them simply and briefly; he
told them what they must do—not why they must do it, but simply because
he ordered them to, and expected their obedience—relying on the
worshipful fear with which they regarded him.
"If I hear of your disobeying me—and I shall hear it, for my ears are
long and sharp—I shall come back and I will kill the dog who dared to
disobey my commands, and you are to obey and do just what the _Sahib_ I
leave here tells you to do—do you understand?"
A low murmuring of assent greeted him, and one or two of the women held
their babies up that they might look upon the great _Sahib_ who was
leaving them for a time; who was wise enough to know ten miles off if
anyone disobeyed him; who was strong enough to kill the dog who tried to
disobey his great commands.
And the murmuring of their voices followed him as he rode away from them
later, and the echo of their "_Sahib! Sahib! Sahib!_" haunted him, not
knowing that in the years that lay ahead, the native mothers would tell
their babies of the greatness of the Sahib who once had come to them.
The shadows, the children of the sunset, lay thick upon the road, over
which he journeyed back to Mackenzie, and in the silence he began to
think of England and of Scotland, and of Cary.
He thought of them all then, in the pause that came between the struggle
he had just passed through and the struggle that lay ahead, as he had
not had the time or peace to think of them since he had left Patna. Nor
did he try to force the thoughts from him as he had done on leaving
Patna, but he went in search of them as a father goes in search of
little truant children hiding in the dark, and brings them back and
holds them close with caresses.
He brought the vision of Mactier forth so, and he went over every
familiar gesture, every tone of Mactier’s voice he knew; he called up
the mother-face of his aunt, the soft pressure of her hand; and he
thought of his uncle and Maggie and Kenneth, and of
Stewart—lingeringly—and of his father.