The Great Amulet Part 24

Quita felt her husband stiffen, and lifted her head.

"Thank you--thank you," she said with a twisted smile. "I think I can stand on my feet now."

In two strides he was clear of the mud, and had set her on firm earth.

But she was still clinging to his arm when Garth came up, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with concern.

"I'm quite disappointingly all right," she a.s.sured him hastily, stung by a keen sense that her catastrophe had fallen headlong from impending tragedy to bathos. "Please bestow all your sympathy on Mr Bathurst, and Unlimited Loo!"

For a second Garth looked up at the man who stood beside her; but only for a second. For in the Scotchman's eye hate gleamed like a naked sword; and Garth had small taste for bared weapons of any kind.

"_Ah, mon pauvre Michel_!" Quita exclaimed, in a quick rush of tenderness, as her brother half ran to her, white and panting, both hands outstretched: and deserting Lenox, she flew to him, anathematising her own folly in a rapid flow of French. "Take me to my tent now," she concluded, linking her arm in his. "I still feel idiotically shaky, and I am certainly no loss to my side!--Mr Bathurst"--she turned in Jeff's direction--"please forgive me. I promise I'll never ask you to lend me a polo pony again!"

Bathurst,--who had rescued his treasure, and was feeling him all over with skilled hands,--shouted a cheery: "Don't mention it, Miss Maurice.

Always glad to oblige a lady!"

And with a tired smile she turned back to Michael.

"_Viens, mon cher_," she said gently; and he led her away.

Conscious of Garth's eyes on her face, she could not trust herself to look again at Lenox, who had neither moved nor spoken since he set her on dry ground. But that one moment in his arms had solved her problem in a fas.h.i.+on that she dreamed not of: a fas.h.i.+on that still seemed past belief.

She knew now that she had never lost him; and her heart sang a Jubilate Deo all the way to her tent. But she knew also that his pride equalled hers; that the first move was 'up to her'; and that now, at last, she might make it without fear of rebuff. But how--how?

Ten minutes later Maurice left her prostrate, in the twilight of her tent;--eau de cologne on her temples, and a chaos of mixed emotions at her heart.

CHAPTER XII.

"How the world seems made for each of us; How all we perceive and know in it Tends to some moment's product,--thus, When the soul declares itself; to wit, By its fruit: the thing it does."

--Browning.

Quita lacked courage to appear again in public till the dinner bugle sounded. Garth was her promised partner: and she found him awaiting her just outside her tent.

"My turn now, dear lady," he said, pressing her fingertips against his side, as she took his proffered arm. "It has been a blank afternoon for me; but in revenge, I mean to keep you all the evening."

"You are presumptuous, as always!" she answered with admirable lightness. "Your claim ends with dessert."

"Quite so. But you are generous; and I can trust the rest to you, since you know how much I want it."

She smiled, as in duty bound. But to-night the man's facile gallantry revolted her as it had never yet done. She wondered how she had endured it these many months.

The instant they entered the long tent her eyes sought and found the thing they craved: though the sight of Lenox in his accustomed place between the Desmonds reawakened her smouldering jealousy of Honor, and gave the lie to her amazing instant of revelation. But once during the meal she encountered her husband's eyes. It was as if he had put out a hand and touched her; and her partner's veiled love-making became a meaningless murmur at her ear. Yet the surface of her brain travelled mechanically along the beaten track of dinner-table talk: and Garth, finding her gentler and more serious than her wont, deemed his hour of triumph very near at hand. Direct encouragement, in the face of his hidden knowledge, had strengthened his conviction that for many weeks she had been stifling her true feelings; that one touch at the right moment would suffice to lift the veil, to bring her at last into his arms. Beyond that moment of mastery he did not choose to look. For to-night pa.s.sion had elbowed prudence out of the field. He had claimed her for the evening; and he antic.i.p.ated great things from the next two hours under the stars.

At these informal camp dinners men and women left the table together; only habitual card-players remaining behind to tempt fortune until the small hours. Quita's hope had been that Desmond might come to her aid.

But he had made up a rubber of whist; and to her dismay, she saw Lenox and Honor depart without him. Garth, who also noted their movements, carefully led her round to the far side of a blazing bonfire, piled ten feet high on this last night of Arcadia; and with a suppressed sigh she resigned herself to an evening of comic songs and personalities; and decided that a headache must rescue her, if no other champion were forthcoming.

It was a clear night of stars. The moon had not yet risen; though a herald brightness gave news of her coming. No least whisper of wind stirred the tree-tops. Sun-baked fir branches crackled and snapped like fairy musketry; and many-hued flames,--rose and saffron, heliotrope and sea-green,--played hide-and-seek among them, flinging inverted shadows on faces nearest the blaze.

Human beings break into song round a bonfire as naturally as birds after a shower of rain, and for those who see in such a fire no mere holocaust of dead twigs, but the Red Flower of the Jungle, the symbol and spirit of wild life, this spontaneous minstrelsy has a charm peculiarly its own. A charm of the simplest, certainly; for at camp-fires the banjo reigns supreme; and the aptest songs are those that 'rip your very heartstrings out' and offer fine facilities for effervescing between the verses.

Already a remarkable a.s.sortment of these had challenged the winking stars; and Quita was encouraging the requisite headache, while Garth contemplated the suggestion of a stroll towards the lake, when Michael Maurice came up to them.

"Quita, _cherie_, they have sent me to ask if you will sing. I have my fiddle here for accompaniment."

She hesitated. A rare shyness, born of the afternoon's fiasco, was still upon her.

"Who sent you?" she asked, smiling up at him.

"Colonel Mayhew, and several others." He bent lower. "_Tu es trop fatiguee apres ce vilain polo_?"

"_Non, ce n'est pas ca . . . mais . . ._"

"Do, Miss Maurice, please, do," urged an enthusiastic young civilian on her left. "A woman's voice, especially yours, would be a rare treat after our promiscuous shouting."

And on her other side Garth, pressing closer, whispered his plea.

"Don't disappoint me. It is ages since I last heard you sing."

Without answering either, she touched her brother's arm. "Tune up, Michel," she said low and hurriedly. "I have thought of a song."

Garth murmured his thanks with unusual _empress.e.m.e.nt_. Her instant acquiescence had both moved and flattered him; and his hopes rode high.

As a matter of fact, she had not even heard his request. She had simply obeyed an impulse, as in most crises of her life;--an impulse so peremptory that it seemed almost a command from Beyond.

"What song is it to be?" Maurice asked, when the tuning process was complete.

"Swinburne's 'Ask Nothing More.'"

He raised his eyebrows. "A man's song?"

"Yes. But you know I often sing it; and I want to . . . to-night."

"_Qu'y a-t-il, pet.i.te soeur_?" he asked, for her manner puzzled him.

"_Rien . . . rien de tout_. Commence."

And he played the soft chords, pregnant with pleading, that usher in the song.

A moment later, Lenox, leaning back in a canvas chair, sat upright, and took the cigar from his lips.

"A woman singing? Jove--it's Quita!" he added under his breath. Then he remained motionless, straining his eyes for a sight of her between the dancing flames.

Clear and unfaltering her voice soared into the night; and as the song swept on, through pleading to impa.s.sioned longing, the whole awakened heart of her took fire from the poet's faultless phrases; till, in the last verse, it spoke straightly and simply to her husband, as though they two stood alone in the interstellar s.p.a.ces of the universe.

"I who have love, and no more, Give you but love of you, sweet; He that hath more, let him give; He that hath wings let him soar.

Mine is the heart at your feet . . .

Here that must love you . . . love you, to live!"