Caravans By Night Part 55

2

A bath in a collapsible canvas tub; clean clothing; dinner in a high-ceilinged, cool room; and, afterward, Trent, Kerth and the young Agent talking, over cigars.

Dana Charteris had slipped away soon after the meal, and the room seemed barren to Trent. He scarcely heard his two companions, and sat nervously fingering the arm of the chair and blowing smoke into the air. When he could no longer endure it he begged to be excused and went to the room a.s.signed to him, where he got from his pack a certain object and thrust it into his pocket.

In the compound he encountered a Gurkha.... Yes, he had seen the memsahib, the soldier replied; he heard her order one of the sahib's muleteers to saddle her pony and she went toward Pal-khor Choide.

Trent followed.

He had pa.s.sed the crimson walls of the lamasery before he saw her--a slender shadow ahead in the dusk. He urged his pony into a canter, and presently slackened pace beside her. She had not turned, but now the brown eyes were directed upon him and he felt a polar coldness in the look. For a moment his voice refused to answer his summons.

"Dana--" he faltered. "Why did you run away, like this?"

She smiled--not the smile he knew, that awakened a golden memory of autumn forests and cathedral s.p.a.ces.

"I wanted to be alone. Why did you follow?"

From his pocket he drew a glinting bracelet. In the dusk she saw the cobra-head lifted in bizarre relief. It seemed to strike into her heart.

"To give you this;"--his voice was low, trembling--"to tell you that I cannot be your--your bracelet-brother longer." He seemed to drink courage from those first words and plunged ahead. "Back there in Burma, at the jungle camp, I promised myself that until we reached civilization I'd remain the--the brother; and now...." He extended the bracelet.

"Won't you accept it?"

The winter-light faded suddenly from her eyes; they shone with a new illumination. With its coming, the chill in his heart thawed; the early night was aromatic and healing. (Overhead a few stars were caught in the gauzy dusk, like dewdrops in a web.) Her fingers closed about the bracelet.

"I've been so foolis.h.!.+" she whispered, in a choked voice. "Oh, so childish and small--while you've been big and fine and strong. Arnold Trent, forgive me! I thought because--because you didn't speak; because you didn't tell me of what I saw in your eyes--back there in Burma--that, like _Sentimental Tommy_, the glamour tarnished when you touch it--that you were just--play-acting--and, because the adventure was over, you--you...." She swallowed, then finished: "Oh, I've been such a foolish _Grizel_!"

... When they rode back into Gyangtse the distant, purple-black spurs of the Himalayas were swimming in the pallid l.u.s.ter poured from a flagon moon.

3

Serpents of tobacco smoke writhed in the room where Euan Kerth and the young District Agent had been talking since dinner; spiraled about the two tanned faces and dissolved, as if by magic, leaving a thin grayish haze.

"... If anyone else had told me that, Euan Kerth," said the young officer, breaking a long silence, "I wouldn't believe it!... And they're in those sacks! No wonder you wanted a dozen Gurkhas to guard 'em! Gad!

Of course I'll lend you an escort! Why, if it were learned that we had 'em, here in this house, we'd be murdered before midnight! But go on, man, finish your story."

Kerth resumed. The golden roofs of Lhakang-gompa lived in his words; s.h.i.+ngtse-lunpo, with its maze of whitewashed houses. Another long silence followed when he finished. The serpents of smoke still crawled and lolled in the air. Cavendish spoke.

"Kerth, I wonder--" He broke off; the lonely hungering in his eyes was clouded by an expression of bewilderment. He cleared his throat; laughed. "Of course, it can't be so, but.... Well, about six months ago an old lama was sick in the Jong. They brought him to me, on a litter, just before he died--at his request. He told me something queer. He said that Lha.s.sa was no longer the political center of Tibet, and that the man in the Potala was not the Dalai Lama, but a priest posing as the Dalai Lama. He said the real Dalai Lama was in another monastery--somewhere toward Mongolia--that there...." Again he broke off; laughed. "But of course there can't be anything to it."

And Euan Kerth, his face dimmed by the smoke from his cheroot, smiled his satanic smile.

"No, of course," he repeated, "there can't be anything to it."