The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales Part 5

"I caught him by the arm, and we peered down the slope together.

At the foot of it, and by the edge of the lake, there ran a strip of white beach; and there, and almost directly below us, were gathered the Berbalangs.

"They were moving and pus.h.i.+ng into place in a sort of circle around a small bundle which at first sight I took for a heap of clothes. At that distance they seemed harmless enough, and, barring the strangeness of the spot, might have been an ordinary party of islanders forming up for a dance. But when, all of a sudden, the ring came to a standstill, and a figure stepped out of it towards the bundle in the centre, my wits came back to me, and I flung up both arms, shouting 'Aoodya! Aoodya!'

"She must have made three paces in the time my voice took to reach her.

She was close to the child. Then she halted and stood for a moment gazing up at me. I saw something bright drop from her. And with that she stooped, caught up the child, and was racing up the slope towards us.

"'Steady!' muttered Hamid, as a man broke from the circle, plucked up the knife from the sand and rushed after her. 'Steady!' he said again.

"Aoodya had a start of twenty yards or more, and in the first half-minute she actually managed to better it. Hamid, beside me, rubbed a bullet quickly on the rind of one of his lime-fruits and rammed it home. He took an eternal time about it; and below, now, the man was gaining. Unluckily their courses brought them into line, and twice the old man cursed softly and lowered his piece.

"Flesh and blood could not stand this. I let out a groan and sprang down the cliff. It was madness, and at the third step all foothold slipped from under me; but my clutch was tight on a fistful of creepers, and their tendrils were tough as a s.h.i.+p's rope. So down I went, now touching earth, now fending off from the rock with my feet, now missing hold and sprawling into a ma.s.s of leaves and roots, among which I clutched wildly and checked myself by the first thing handy--until, with the crack of Hamid's musket above, the vine, or whatever it was to which I clung for the moment, gave way as if shorn by the bullet, and I pitched a full twenty feet with a rush of loose earth and dust.

"I fell almost at the heels of Aoodya's enemy, upon a ledge along which he was swiftly running her down. Hamid's bullet had missed him, and before I could make the third in the chase he was forty yards ahead.

I saw his bare shoulders parting the creepers--threading their way in and out like a bobbin, and jogging as the pace fell slower; for now we were all three in difficulties. Perhaps Aoodya had missed the track; at any rate the ledge we were now following grew shallower as it curved over the corner of the beach and ran sheer over the water of the lake.

A jungle tree leaned out here, with a clear drop of a hundred feet.

As I closed on my man, he swerved and began to clamber out along the trunk; and over his shoulder I saw Aoodya, with the babe in the crick of her arm, upon a bough which swayed and sank beneath her.

"I clutched at his ankle. He reached back with a hiss of his breath and jabbed his knife down on my left hand, cutting across the two middle fingers and pinning me through the small bones to the trunk. I tell you, sir, I scarcely felt it. My right went down to my waist and pulled out the _kris_ there. He was the man I had caught within the verandah three days before; these were the same eyes s.h.i.+ning, like a cat's, back into mine, and what I had promised him then I gave him now. But it was Hamid who killed him. For as my _kris_ went into the flank of him, above the hip, Hamid's second shot cut down through his neck. His face at the moment rested sideways against the branch, and I suppose the bullet pa.s.sed through to the bough and cost me Aoodya. For as the Berbalang fell, the bough seemed to rip away from where his cheek had rested, and Aoodya, with my child in her arms, swung back under my feet and dropped like a stone into the lake.

"I can't tell you, sir, how long I lay stretched out along that trunk, with the Berbalang's knife still pinned through my hand. I was staring down into the water. Aoodya and my child never rose again; but the Berbalang came to the surface at once and floated, bobbing for a while on the ripple, his head thrown back, his brown chest s.h.i.+ning up at me, and the blood spreading on the water around it.

"It was Hamid who unpinned me and led me away. He had made s.h.i.+ft to climb down, and while binding up my wounded hand pointed towards the beach. It was empty. The crowd of Berbalangs had disappeared.

"He found the track which Aoodya had missed, and as he led me up and out of the crater I heard him talking--talking. I suppose he was trying to comfort me--he was a good fellow; but at the top I turned on him, and 'Master,' I said, 'you have tried to do me much kindness, but to-day I have bought my quittance.' With that I left him standing and walked straight over the brow of the hill. I never looked behind me until I reached the Spaniards' compound, and called out at the gate to be let pa.s.s.

"Captain Marquinez was lying in a hammock in the cool of his verandah when the gate-keeper took me to him. He was, I think, the weariest man I ever happened on. 'So you want to leave the island?' said he when my tale was out. 'Yes, yes, I believe you; I've learnt to believe anything of those devils up yonder. But you must wait a fortnight, till the relief-boat arrives from Jola'--"

Here the story-teller broke off as a rider upon a grey horse came at a foot-pace round the slope of Burrator below us and pa.s.sed on without seeing. It was the Rajah, returning solitary from the hunt, and his eyes were still fastened ahead of him.

"Ah, great man! England is a weary hole for the likes of you and me.

It's here they talk of the East, but we have loved it and hated it and known it, and remember. Our eyes have seen--our eyes have seen."

He stood up, pulled himself together with a kind of s.h.i.+ver, and suddenly shambled away across the slope, having said no good-bye, but leaving me there at gaze.

VICTOR.

I.

"You will ruin his life," said one of the two women. As the phrase escaped her she remembered, or seemed to remember, having met with it in half a dozen novels. She had nerved herself for the interview which up to this moment had been desperately real; but now she felt herself losing grip. It had all happened before . . . somewhere; she was reacting an old scene, going through a part; the four or five second-hand words gave her this sensation. Then she reflected that the other woman, too, had perhaps met them before in some cheap novelette, and, being an uneducated person, would probably find them the more impressive for that.

The other woman had in fact met them before, in the pages of _Bow Bells_, and been impressed by them. But since then love had found her ignorant and left her wise; wiser than in her humiliation she dared to guess, and yet the wiser for being humiliated. She answered in a curiously dispa.s.sionate voice: "I think, miss, his life is ruined already; that is, if he sent you to say all this to me."

"He did not." Miss Bracy lifted the nose and chin which she inherited from several highly distinguished Crusaders, and gave the denial sharply and promptly, looking her ex-maid straight in the face. She had never-- to use her own words--stood any nonsense from Ba.s.sett.

But Ba.s.sett, formerly so docile (though, as it now turned out, so deceitful); who had always known her place and never answered her mistress but with respect; was to-day an unrecognisable Ba.s.sett--not in the least impudent, but as certainly not to be awed or brow-beaten.

Standing in the glare of discovered misconduct, under the scourge of her shame, the poor girl had grasped some secret strength which made her invincible.

"But I think, miss," she answered, "Mr. Frank must have known you was coming." And this Miss Bracy could not deny. She had never told a lie in her life.

"It is very likely--no, it is certain--that he guessed," she admitted.

"And if so, it comes to the same thing," Ba.s.sett persisted, with a shade of weariness in her voice.

"You ungrateful girl! You ungrateful and quite extraordinary girl!

First you inveigle that poor boy at the very outset of his career, and then when upon a supposed point of honour he offers to marry you--"

"A 'supposed' point, miss? Do you say 'supposed'?"

"Not one in a thousand would offer such a redemption. And even he cannot know what it will mean to his life--what it will cost him."

"I shall tell him, miss," said Ba.s.sett quietly.

"And his parents--what do you suppose they would say, were they alive?

His poor mother, for instance?"

Ba.s.sett dismissed this point silently. To Miss Bracy the queerest thing about the girl was the quiet practical manner she had put on so suddenly.

"You said, miss, that Mr. Frank wants to make amends on a 'supposed'

point of honour. Don't you think it a real one?"

Miss Bracy's somewhat high cheekbones showed two red spots. "Because he offers it, it doesn't follow that you ought to accept. And that's the whole point," she wound up viciously.

Ba.s.sett sighed that she could not get her question answered.

"You will excuse me, miss, but I never 'inveigled' him, as you say.

That I deny; and if you ask Mr. Frank he will bear me out. Not that it's any use trying to make you believe," she added, with a drop back to her old level tone as she saw the other's eyebrows go up. It was indeed hopeless, Miss Bracy being one of those women who take it for granted that a man has been inveigled as soon as his love-affairs run counter to their own wishes or taste; and who thereby reveal an estimate of man for which in the end they are pretty sure to pay heavily. All her answer now was a frankly incredulous stare.

"You won't believe me, miss. It's not your fault, I know; you _can't_ believe me. But I loved Mr. Frank."

Miss Bracy made a funny little sound high up in her Crusader nose.

That the pa.s.sions of gentlemen were often ill-regulated she knew; it disgusted her, but she recognised it as a real danger to be watched by their anxious relatives. That _love_, however--what she understood by _love_--could be felt by the lower orders, the people who "walked together" and "kept company" before mating, was too incredible.

Even if driven by evidence to admit the fact she would have set it down to the pernicious encroachment of Board School education, and remarked that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

"'Love!' My poor child, don't profane a word you cannot possibly understand. A nice love, indeed, that shows itself by ruining his life!"

That second-hand phrase again! As it slipped out, the indomitable Ba.s.sett dealt it another blow.

"I am not sure, miss, that I love him any longer--in the same way, I mean. I should always have a regard for him--for many reasons--and because he behaved honourably in a way. But I couldn't quite believe in him as I did before he showed himself weak."

"Well, of all the--" Miss Bracy's lips were open for a word to fit this offence, when Ba.s.sett followed it up with a worse one.

"I beg your pardon, miss, but you are so fond of Mr. Frank--Supposing I refused his offer, would you marry him yourself?"