Francis Prevost

“ Though Terrington had urged Rose Chantry to rest while she could, the morning light was peering between the curtains of the doolie before sleep closed her eyes. She listened all night to the silent march: the grunts and whinny of the mules, the jangle of harness, the low-spoken orders of unseen men. And under it all the beat of feet in the dust, the quick clatter of driven hoofs, the dull even tramp of armed men. ”

“ Along the northern shore of the bay the shade of the bluff had fallen, and made a leaden edging to the sea.
Southward the low sun blazed, a dull rose-red, against the scarp of cliff, and turned the further waters and the dim head-lands beyond them to a wine-dipped purple.
"It's as solemnly gorgeous as you could well have it," Maurice affirmed as he hauled in the boat, "and we're going out of this spiny harbour under all sail to show we take the display in a proper spirit." ”

“ Freddy Gale, though he had twice fallen from exhaustion, had directed personally the issue of rations, and used every chance to cheer his men; but he missed that sense of their condition, and they the sense of his control, which can come from sight alone.
They lay in the snow, inert, benumbed, certain victims to that frozen sleep from which there is no wakening. Only the old soldiers of the Guides had stretched their blankets, and made any likeness to a bivouac.
Terrington's voice came upon the scene like the call of a bugle. ”

“ The smile of humorous toleration with which Maurice Caragh accepted half the perplexities of life had always seemed to her so completely to reveal his mind—like the pool before them, through which the light filtered to the very floor—that this dark humour of depreciation let out the sounding line through her fingers into unanchorable depths.
"I think you're a little hard," she said slowly; "women aren't vain, as a rule; at least not like that. It's their humility that makes them care so much to be admired." ”

“ Her courtesy, which so appealed to Kapitany, seemed to Caragh like a frozen forceps feeling for his nerves. They were both of them beyond the use of courtesies, which may lead back along the road of friendship as far, and faster, than they have led forward. Her affability seemed that night to thrust Caragh back to the days spent in fascinated speculation on the advice in Ethel Vernon's eyes. He had taken it, or supposed he had taken it, in the end, and for nearly three years now she had stood for everything of woman's interest and adjustment in his life. ”

“ The Dogras, being on the lower ground, were the first to get within thrusting distance, and closed on a terrified huddle of men swinging this way and that in frenzied efforts to escape like a frightened flock of sheep, and crying out for mercy from the bayonets that pierced them from behind. The mercy meted out to them was the mercy of the Durbar—a swift end, and the scorn of born fighters in their ears; and, as the Bakót levies descended with their crooked knives upon the scurrying flanks, the Saris flung away their arms and fought with each other to escape the avengers. ”

“ The flag fell, the click of the mirror took up the speech of its shaken folds, and dazzling lances of sunlight flung from ten miles away began tilting with the lashes of Rose Chantry's eyes. She was so absorbed by the strangeness of their silent language, that she was startled to find that Terrington had dropped alone and unnoticed from the rocks above her, and was scribbling a message which he handed as he finished it to the havildar. ”

“ At a height of twelve thousand feet each movement was a struggle, and, from ceaseless fighting, marching and want of sleep, every nerve and muscle were at the breaking point. Gale, blind and worn out, but cheery as ever, facing a fight which he could not see, kept the rear-guard in splendid shape, and Clones, though blind also and suffering from frost-bite, continued to feel his way among the wounded.
The faith of all was pinned desperately upon Terrington, and keen the anxiety about his sight. ”

“ Terrington, completely at fault, made no attempt to console her. He knew when to leave a man unhindered and to give a horse its head, and the instinct helped him with a woman's tears. He stood watching her sobbing shoulders, and the shadows on her golden hair, but his thoughts, the instant they were freed from her, flew forward to the forcing of the Sorágh Gul, the double-headed defile on the road to Rashát, where he knew Mir Khan could intercept him and compel him to face an attack from three sides at once. ”

“ She had learnt his fineness at every turn of his thoughts. Her spirit, that had touched his at first so timidly, had come to seek with passionate security its most intimate caress. There was nothing she had not revealed to him, no shame so sweet nor so secret which she had feared to let him know.
And now!
"If I had loved a devil unawares," reflected Terence sadly, "I hardly think I would have cast her out like that. Love should not, for its own dignity, degrade so easily what it has ennobled." ”

“ Far away upon a spur above the road by which they had come she could make out the flutter of an answering signal, and, while she tried to follow it, suddenly a star of light winked like a sunlit window on the hill-side far down the defile.
It stirred the little group like the fall of a shell. The havildar thrust his paper and pencil on the unoccupied sepoy, hoisted the heliograph over his shoulder, and scrambled out of the sangar with his head turning as he went for a glimpse of the unexpected sun. ”

“ The ship he had left was now lost to him in each trough of the waves; he could hear the break of the rollers over the reef, and saw that the tide had already drifted him to windward of the wreck. The roar in front increased as he proceeded, and at last he could see, as he rose, the waves thirty yards beyond him suddenly flatten, flinging up a veil of spray into the air. For a moment he hung irresolute; there, if ever a man might see it, was death visible before him. ”

“ That fight, the most sanguine for its size in Indian history, which has coloured the name as it dyed the water of Rashát river, would have been lost but for the arrival at its crisis of men on whose coming he had no right to count. It was won indeed, won in its overwhelming effectiveness by his subtlety, his daring tactics, his personal valour, but it would have been lost despite all those, despite any devices that men could have contrived, had not a certain company of the Guides possessed the splendid training and the undauntable energy of the men whom Afzul Singh had led. ”

“ If he had once loved her he might have faced her without disgrace in the day his love had died, but there was no grace left him now but his deception. That, henceforth, was to be the high thing, the stimulating fineness of his life; and, curiously enough, it woke in him a determination, manful and tender, which no real passion of the past had been able to arouse.
It woke too, though from less tranquil slumbers, the remembrance of his mutations, the grieved conviction of instability. He, least of all men, should furnish a socket for the lamp of constancy. ”

“ The circle about his own camp fire was completed by Walcot and Freddy Gale, and it was there that Rose Chantry watched the ways of men who have come out of battle. Walcot, who had fought well and been slightly wounded in the shoulder, seemed unable to talk enough. Speech gurgled out of him like rain from a gargoyle. Freddy Gale listened, throwing in brief descriptive touches, his round merry face convulsed from time to time with infectious laughter. Terrington, who sat beside her, said nothing at all, but the keenness of his eyes was softened by a grave content. ”

“ Her quick breath spread the starlight to a vague and smoky blueness among the gleaming sequins on her breast. "Yes," he said, "that is probably what I do mean. First or last, whatever you may call her, it's the woman's self that counts."
She remained for a moment with her eyes still passionately alight, and something visible even in the dusk upon her face which she would and would not say. Then her mouth hardened, and she flung herself back in her chair.
"I hate you," she cried.
"No," he said with a sigh; "you hate the fact. Every woman does whom it doesn't profit." ”

“ Rose seemed only to have just ceased to watch the changing colour of the flame on Terrington's face when a hand was laid on her shoulder and his voice spoke in her ear. She jumped up, dreaming of battles, so stiff that she would have fallen but for the arm which he put under hers. The doolie suddenly appeared out of the darkness, he helped her in, bade her good-bye with a clasp of the hand, dropped a sharp order to the sentry who strode beside her, and was gone. The bearers moved off at a quick amble, and when they halted she knew she was amongst men. ”

“ He drew a wicker chair from the wall and threw himself into it with a sigh.
"I only hope it isn't true," he said.
She leaned forward over the table, gripping its edge, her face thrust out, like a figure on a ship's prow.
"Honest Injun!" she cried, sparkling. "Every word. Durbar to-morrow. Khan's guard and tom-toms round at eleven, and off we march at noon. Oh! don't you wish you were going?"
"Not at all," he said drily. "I've never wished to die like a trapped mouse." ”

“ Love had come to him in the extravagant splendours it only wears for those who find it late, with the eyes still unsoiled through which youth sought it. For, to the boy, love is only a white angel, but the man sees it iridescent with the colours of his accumulated years of hope.
It was not surprising that Terence, who had never even imagined himself in love before, and whose every instinct forbade a paltering with its substitute, should have been overwhelmed by this putting forth of an enchantment he had long ceased to expect. ”

“ Beyond the cool darkness of the entrance door, against the far wall of the blazing courtyard she could see the row of charpoys with their burden of dead men, mere rolls of sallow dungari cloth, waiting till the grave being dug beside the Residency gate should be wide enough to hold them. It was the most dreadful moment of her life, when she needed above all to be petted and comforted into a sense of her importance, but the man who should have done it was indifferent even to her safety. She had already begun to cheer herself with the thought of a siege ”

“ He was a big genial man, with no sense of his own importance, and a fixed belief in bluffness. He had shewn Terrington his instructions, some six weeks earlier, on the night his escort joined him, and the two were sitting smoking after dinner outside the tent—the stillness of the evening only broken by the cry of a jackal or the scream of an owl—looking up at the black mountain wall that blotted out the northern stars, over which they were to climb on the morrow to an unknown fate. ”

“ Near the centre was a body of horsemen tailing out along the road, which made a gay tendril of colour even at that leaden hour, it was the Khan's bodyguard in purple and fawn and gold.
As Rose Chantry moved the glasses from end to end of the enemy's column, her certainty of a safe return to India collapsed utterly.
She looked round at Terrington, expecting to see the same despair on his face that had seized upon her heart, but he was watching Mir Khan's advance with an unaltered countenance.
"Oh, Captain Terrington!" she cried hopelessly, "there are thousands of them: they'll eat us up." ”

“ She looked at him with the wistful misgiving which was always stirred by his half-serious banter. "I know a hero," she said, "who is very, very dear to-day."
He met the love in her eyes with such a tender appreciation that, disregarding the windows, she had half risen to kiss him, when the head steward entering, wrinkled with smiles and suffusing the joyousness of the occasion, set a breakfast tray between them.
He greeted Lettice with the custom of an old retainer, and commented on Caragh's health as though personally responsible for its condition. ”

“ In art—and art is but the tenderer appreciation of life—they would never use the same language, never understand each other's speech. The marvelling thrill of familiar strangeness, of joyous apprehension, which the subtlety of art can wake in the initiate, they would never share.
That was not much to miss, perhaps; but, when Caragh tried to think of something its absence would not affect, he stopped in dismay. ”

“ She poured out the indictment to his bewildered ears in the level tones of utter apathy; but when it was done she flung herself violently across the head of the lounge in a tempest of passionate tears.
Terence, despairing of any further fitness or sanity in the affair, resigned himself to the situation with a sigh, and knelt beside her for an hour, until she appeared to draw from his caresses a renewed confidence in life. ”

“ He, so it seemed, was to contribute his existence, and she, a smile.
But if its seriousness was an absurdity, its absurdities were serious. Terence heard them with grave lips; heard in them, too, the diffident whispers of his pity swollen by her fancy to a blare of passion.
It was serious enough as she sounded it, and sad enough too. Disillusionment, even the gentlest, seemed out of the question.
How, to a woman who rides, triumphing in his devotion, through the barriers of her decorum, is a man to say, "I do not love you"? ”

“ He took it from her with another smile.
"I'm so unused to the luxury of being looked after by a lady."
But he gave her hand a clasp which meant a good deal more to it than gratitude.
Rose Chantry sat almost motionless during the hour which followed, in that happy sort of preoccupation which is outside of time. She had strapped on Terrington's watch, to feel the loose shackle of it about her thin wrist, and looked now and again at its face with startled consciousness, unaware if minutes or hours had gone by since her last inspection. ”