The Hosts of the Lord Part 20

For those of the camp who were bound to follow the Viceroy's whim of riding by the old road--the pilgrims' road--while the big camp went round by the longer, easier route, had promised to look in on the palace on their way past it, for a cup of tea, a good-by. Since already, the functions over, the dream-city had begun to melt away; the Hosts of the Lord-_sahib_ were pa.s.sing on.

"Glory be!" said the Commissioner with heart-felt grat.i.tude, "we've done our worst and leave you to take the consequences. That's sound policy. Anyhow, we are ahead of everybody on the road to heaven, and the pilgrims will have to swallow the dust of our feet! I wonder how they'll like it." He was in wild spirits, like a schoolboy escaped from school; yet as he paused to shake hands with Dr. Dillon, he said aside, "Any more cases?"

"Two," said the doctor, laconically, "both dead. It is a bad type."

His hearer's face was unmovable as he turned to Mrs. Smith, who stood close by. "Good-by, my dear lady," he said cheerfully, "remember me house is yours if you, or the child, want it. Doctor, couldn't you conscientiously recommend change of air to the hills? Couldn't ye swear the close proximity to an open ca.n.a.l and a gaol is unwholesome? If ye could, you'd oblige a gra.s.s-widower, whose wife is at Baden-Baden--or is it Marienbad?--living prodigally, while he has to fill himself with husks which no self-respecting swine would eat. Faith, me dear madam, I'd bless you if you'd come and kill the cook. It's a woman's work; not a man's."

Dr. Dillon, with a quick look, backed him up instantly. "Certainly. I told Mrs. Smith a long time ago that she and Gladys had had enough of Eshwara. Indeed, as her doctor, she would be doing me a personal favour if--"

Muriel Smith swept round on him sharply. She was looking her very best, in her very best gown; white, mystic, wonderful, with a faint gleam of silver embroidery about waist and hem. And she had been obtrusively, unnecessarily friendly with Vincent Dering all the afternoon; even now she was standing with him attached to her ap.r.o.n-strings.

"I don't think nervous headaches are dangerous," she said, eying Dr.

Dillon coolly. "But thanks all the same. I should love to kill somebody; even a cook. Perhaps I may, by and by, when _all_ the nice people leave. I'm so sorry _you're_ going, but we are still to be quite gay, aren't we, Captain Dering? And that reminds me we have to settle when that riding party is to come off. Good-by--good-by!" She waved her hand to the departing Commissioner, and carried Vincent Dering off, with a defiant look at the doctor.

He, knowing her, smiled indulgently; but Father Ninian, who had come down to see his guest off, looked after her with a wistful pain in his kind old face.

"That is a mistake," he said briefly; then the wistfulness grew into a puzzled look, and he added, half to himself, "It need not be, surely; there is something wrong. I can't understand--"

Dr. Dillon, catching the end of the remark, gave a cynical laugh and turned on his heel. "No one does," he said as he went off. He would not discuss her even with dear old Pidar Narayan. For the rest, though he was keen to get back to his jail, he would wait till she tired of her game, and then drive her home himself to her idiot of a husband, who was too busy over his blessed search-light to see things that were going on under his very eyes.

Captain Dering, however, was already impatient. It was growing dusk; the shadows were claiming the garden bit by bit, and as the glint left the varnished leaves of the orange trees, the white flowers stood out like little stars against the gloom and sent a bewildering perfume into the darkening air. He could see no hint of Laila anywhere; Laila in that detestable white muslin garment which made him long vainly to get rid of the surroundings which suited her so ill, drive all that civilized crew from the garden, and claim it as his own--and hers! She must have gone to the balcony already. She must be waiting for him. And yet a soft-heartedness for this other woman with whom he had been friends, whom for a few days he had imagined he loved (it had come to _this_ now) forbade him from leaving her cavalierly. So it was long past dusk, and the short Indian twilight was hovering on the edge of night, ere he made his escape; and, full of anxiety lest Laila should have lost patience or hope, hurried down to the wide archway, and so, by the turn riverwards, to the right, into the balcony. Most girls, he told himself, would by this time have taken offence; but she was there.

As he entered, her figure showed dimly against the light beyond.

"I'm afraid I am awfully late," he began, then paused; for, as she turned, there was a faint clash of silver, a faint gleam of it too. His heart gave a great throb of glad recognition. It was Laila! Laila indeed! the Laila of that dream last night. And she had risked _this_ to please him!

"Are you?" she said. "I thought _I_ was late; for _this_ took time; but I wanted to be the same--always the same to you, always--always!"

She stretched her hands to him, but he set them aside, took her in his arms, and kissed her pa.s.sionately.

"Yes! Laila! always Laila--my Laila!"

She gave him back his kisses joyfully. "I knew you would come," she said. "Love comes to love, you know."

He called her Juliet then, and many another lover's name. She took them all, and gave them back again without reserve, until, as they stood there, someone pa.s.sing outward from the arched pa.s.sage to the garden, paused to listen at the half-heard sound of voices. For Father Ninian--who had come down to his own rooms for a pair of foils wherewith to give Lance Carlyon a lesson in the "_Addio del Marito_,"

until Captain Dering should choose to come out of the recesses of the garden and allow of their going back to the Fort together--knew of none likely to use, or even to be aware of, the balcony. So he turned thither curiously, then stood arrested, so that the clash of the foils on the stone, as he purposely lowered their points, came as a warning to those two that they were observed. Laila, with a catlike noiselessness, withdrew in a second. She, a yard or two away, in deepest shadow, stood leaning in a careless, easy att.i.tude over the bal.u.s.trade. Her only possibility of escape lay, she felt instinctively, in showing no desire to do so. Vincent, for his part, turned to face the old priest, prepared to brazen it out; for his blood was running like wild-fire in his veins. Yet scarcely so fast as the heart's blood had once leapt, and was even now leaping, in the old man who came forward, facing him also. Came forward slowly, shortsightedly, a foil in each hand. If he had held out one, bade him take the b.u.t.ton off and fight for his life, Vincent Dering would scarcely have been surprised, would almost have been pleased. It would have raised him in his own self-esteem. For he knew perfectly well he had no right to be there; that, as yet, he was not sure of his own footing.

But Pidar Narayan did not. He paused, as he generally did, a few paces away, a slender, straight shadow in black, girt about with that pale sash, on which, and on his pale face, such light as there was fell softly. For there was no anger in the latter; only an almost pa.s.sionate regret and pity. Even so, his words startled the young man, who stood prepared for defiance.

"Oh! Captain Dering!" he said courteously, "it is you, is it? You have found a pleasant place, indeed! But scarcely a very safe one for your companion--" he turned to that faint gleam of white and silver in the arched shadow.--"The air grows chill, madam, so close to the river," he continued, his voice taking a tone almost of command, "and you are lightly clad. Will you not be wise, and leave us?"

Vincent's surprise had pa.s.sed by this time into a rush of vexation, almost indignation, for he had grasped the old man's mistake. For an instant he felt bound to undeceive him, then the impossibility of doing so held him silent, feeling a coward indeed; so, desperately, he could only join his voice to Father Ninian's. It seemed the only way out of the _impa.s.se_.

"Perhaps you had better go--"

Laila did not need more. Already, under cover of the shadow, she had dexterously slipped off her silver jingles, lest they should betray what really seemed to her her worst, nay! her only offence;--the taking and wearing of Roshan Khan's present. And now, wrapping her veil about her like a cloak, gathering her trailing skirts to orthodox length with an appalling presence of mind, she was off with just the little uneasy laugh which might well befit the situation.

She left her companion bewildered, yet still facing the old man recklessly. Since he could not explain, he did not mean to be hectored.

Yet, once again, the old voice took him unawares.

"Memory plays strange tricks with us at times," it said slowly, but with a suggestion of the fateful, hopeless rhythm of a Greek chorus in it. "She has taken me back, this evening, nearly sixty long years. The river before us is the yellow flood of the Tiber, the woman who has just left us is the woman I loved--sixty long years ago--I had kissed her, as you have kissed her. I had told her I loved her, as you have just told her--and then, like an echo from the river below where a boat was moored, came to our ears, the same words, 'I love you.'--They were spoken, Captain Dering, by a boy, barely in his teens, to a waiting-maid. The boy was her son. She had been married, as they marry them in Italy, almost before her girlhood, and I, the boy's tutor, was nearer her age than his father--a better man, too, Captain Dering! But those words--'I love you'--parted us once, and for all. They mirrored the truth for us--the truth of the love which hides in balconies--in pleasure boats--" he took a step forward, and his whole presence changed. He raised his hand, priest to its finger tips. "Let it mirror the truth to you also, my son--leave this poor lady to her duty, as I--"

Vincent Dering broke in on him haughtily, his pride in arms, impatience at the falseness of his position making him discourteous.

"You don't understand; you are absolutely mistaken--I refuse to explain, but I really must ask you not to interfere."

The old man's whole bearing changed again. He drew himself up, and, foils in hand, bowed, as fencers do at the salute.

"Were I the lady's husband, sir, I would _make_ you answer. As a priest of G.o.d, I must warn you that I will speak, if--"

Vincent Dering interrupted him again. "I can't prevent that--but you will wrong us--her at any rate--the best, the kindest woman--"

He paused, for Father Ninian had come close, laid a hand on his, and the touch seemed to bring silence.

"It is sixty long years, Captain Dering," he said, and his eyes seemed to pierce through the darkness, "since I have laid my hand on my fellow-men save in the hope of healing. It was a fancy of mine after--after we kissed, and parted. But I touch you as a second self, a fellow-sinner; for she too was the best--the kindest--" His old voice failed.

Despite his anger at the whole miserable mistake, Vincent was touched; but despite his emotion, his annoyance strengthened.

"Possibly," he broke in, "but I must really refuse to discuss the matter further. Shall we end this, sir,--unless--" he gave a reckless laugh and pointed to the foils--"you would like to fight it out?"

Once more Father Ninian bowed, as fencers bow in the salute, the priest, the wise counsellor, lost in an older ent.i.ty than these; in the high-born Scotch student, who, for a while, had forgotten his vocation to ruffle with the best blood in Italy. "I have not the privilege of being the lady's protector," he answered hotly. "If I were,"--He paused, then said courteously, "Shall we come upstairs? I came down for these foils in order to teach Mr. Carlyon the thrust we spoke of once.

'_L'Addio del Marito_,' they called it in my youth--I doubt if the name has changed now. He will be wondering what has become of me, and--and it!"

As Vincent followed him, he felt a thrill at the savageness of the old man's tone, and told himself that here was the Church Militant indeed.

He might have said so with still more reason ten minutes after, when Father Ninian was left alone. For the hour proved too late for lessons, and Lance Carlyon--who had been out of sorts ever since his walk at dawn with Erda Shepherd--was obliged to give in to dinner, grumbling the while, that Vincent was the worst chum he ever came across. Never to be found when he was wanted, then turning up when dear old Pidar Narayan looked as if he could have licked creation.

Possibly Lance might have repeated this a.s.sertion, also, with greater fervour, could he have been witness to Father Ninian's actions, when, his last guest gone, he went to put the foils back in the armoury next the chapel.

For he would have seen him, with head bowed over the crossed foils he held, repeating a "_mea culpa_" as he pa.s.sed the altar; but ere the second foil matched its fellow on the armoury wall, he would have seen as pretty a bit of sword-play as could well be seen. Many a dexterous turn of wrist, many a quick imaginary parry, many a sharp _riposte_, following each other accurately, as if memory held each attack, each defence of an unseen foe; until finally, swift as a flash, would come a falter back, as if from a blow, then a thrust forward.

There was a little silver bell--such as men put to a falcon's hood--no bigger than a sixpence, shaped like a man's heart, upon the ta.s.sel of a resting lance beneath the solitary foil. And the ta.s.sel swayed gently in the cool river breeze.

Yet at each thrust the heart-shaped bell chimed a feeble protest under the b.u.t.ton of the foil, making the Church Militant smile cheerfully.

CHAPTER XIII

AT THE GATES

The darkness which holds the dawn was, as a rule, silent as the grave in the sand-stretches beyond the river, where the wide cut of the ca.n.a.l, the huge mud-heap of the gaol, with its scattered workshops and houses, showed as mere spots and lines on the illimitable plain. But on the night after the band had played "G.o.d save the Queen," while the first drops of sacred water trickled over the c.h.i.n.k of the sluice into the dry bed of the ca.n.a.l below, its silence was broken by unfamiliar sounds.

First of all, by the now ceaseless splash of the thin, gla.s.sy curve of water on its way to find out this new road to the sea. It had a sort of dreamy whisper in it, as if it were telling its first impressions, its hopes, its fears, to the river it was leaving behind.

And on this background of ceaseless sound came two others intermittently.