Part 1

Produced by Al Haines

THE PLAGUE OF THE HEART

BY

FRANCIS PREVOST

AUTHOR OF "FALSE DAWN" "BUST OF GOLD" "ON THE VERGE" "ENTANGLEMENTS" ETC ETC

LONDON WARD, LOCK & CO LIMITED NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE 1902

TO APRIL

Contents

THE SIEGE OF SAR HER REPUTATION THE MEASURE OF A MAN

The Siege of Sar

I

"Have you heard, Captain Terrington?" cried the girl gaily. "There's to be a Durbar after all! So you were wrong. It's to be in the Palace too, that you were so set against, and Lewis and Mr. Langford are going with Sir Colvin, and just the littlest guard of honour for the look of the thing. Sir Colvin says the great thing with these sort of people is to show you're not afraid, and I'm _perfectly certain_ he's right."

She sat upon the table, all in white; her hat slung upon her arm, her feet swinging to and fro amid the muslin fulness of her skirt, pointing her remarks with the tips of their gilded slippers.

The man who had just entered the bungalow in khaki riding kit stood a straight six feet. His face, strong and silent, was as brown as his jacket, and his spare figure had an air of tempered energy. The only break in its entire brownness was the faded strip of ribands on his left breast. At the sight of Mrs. Chantry he had checked the stride with which he entered, lifted his helmet, and pushed back from his forehead its damp brown lock of hair.

As he stood staring at her with a frown, she set her wrists on the edge of the table, and rocked her body gently in time with her feet.

"Well!" she exclaimed with a laugh as he stopped before her; "what did I tell you? I said if you'd only leave Sar for a week I'd get the Durbar, and I've got it in three days!"

She ceased her swinging, and looked up at him with an excited triumph in her eyes. "Well?" she repeated provocatively, leaning back and putting the tip of a tiny tongue between her lips.

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."

She drew herself up resentfully.

"How dare you say that," she cried; "when you know Lewis will be there!"

"All right," he said, too tired to argue; "I'll try to see its good points. How did this happen?"

She was a flouting pouting bird again at once.

"I did it," she declared.

"Oh, did you," he replied without conviction. "When?"

"The moment you started foraging. You're the only man in Sar who doesn't care a da---- a fig for what I think, so I had to wait till you were gone. The others!"

She gave a shrug to her pretty shoulders.

"Well?" enquired Terrington.

"Well, a woman's only got to let a man see she thinks he's afraid of anything to put him at it. I let 'em all see," she said, smiling.

He looked at her hard.

"You think I couldn't?" she challenged.

"I've never thought of anything you couldn't," he said simply.

She looked at him, laughing softly. Then, raising herself on her wrists, poised her dainty figure above the table, letting it swing between her arms, while she met with the fluttering twist of a smile the intent displeasure in his eyes.

"What did you do it for?" he asked.

She pushed herself back along the polished table till her knees and knuckles were side by side.

"What does a woman ever do anything for?" she retorted, leaning over her perch with her elbows upon her knees. "To show she can," she added, as he offered no solution. "I was going to let you see you weren't the king of Sar."

"Good God," he groaned in weary bewilderment. "Where's Sir Colvin?"

She shook her head slowly, smiling, from side to side.

"Don' know, don' know, don' know!" she babbled. "What did you get?"

He took no notice of the question.

"And your husband?" he said.

"Lewis is with Sir Colvin. May be anywhere. Probably messing up my room. They're preparing for the Durbar," she drawled with soft malice.

His preoccupation paid no heed to it; and she went on:

"It's wonderful the hours we do things at here. Just decent breakfast-time and we've had half a day. When did your Majesty breakfast?" she asked.

"Some time yesterday," he said indifferently. "Has Gale written?"

But she was on her feet at once.

"Oh, I say!" she cried. "How horrid of you not to tell me!"

The tatties on the anteroom entrance had closed behind her, like reeds behind a snowy pheasant, ere she finished speaking, and Terrington could hear the "Kitmatgar, O Kitmatgar!" of her lifted childish voice ring along the empty mess-room.

II

As Rose Chantry left the room the light went out of Terrington's face, and an irresistible lassitude crept like a gray smoke across it. He had been for three days in the saddle, with but a couple of his own guides, in a country cut by torrents from precipitous stone, among a silent and lurking people who were only waiting the word to murder him, and for the last day and night he had been living on food snatched from a holster as he rode.

There was no one in Sar to whom he could delegate the duty; no one acquainted as he with the country and the people; no one who knew so intimately their private avarices and animosities; no one who could utilize their tribal treacheries and pretensions, to extract from them the grain they had a mind to keep. They had known him five years before, while Sar was as yet unembroiled of its neighbours, and still admitted British influence and rupees, when his shooting feats had won him the nickname by which everywhere he was known, and the friendship of the men who were waiting now, without breach of friendliness, to put an end to him.

It was on account of this intimate acquaintance that he had been selected to command the escort which accompanied Sir Colvin Aire, whose mission was to settle finally the standing of a resident, and of road repair and protection between Sar and the frontier.

Such simple questions hung however like dewdrops on the web of a wide and hostile political influence. Their disappearance would only be of importance as a signal that the meshes had been cut.

Lewis Chantry had watched the network spreading during the six months he had served as political officer at Sar.

He had smiled at it with a soldier's easy optimism, until he tripped one day upon a strand that was being woven between him and home.

The Indian Government, palsied by a political change of control, and a demand for immediate cheapness however costly, answered his urgent appeals with vague precepts of compromise and Sir Colvin Aire.

Sir Colvin was not cheap, but, from possessing no previous acquaintance with the question, and being the most easily available and palpably the wrong person, he had, at any rate, an air of cheapness.

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.

"You see, they say I'm to make the fullest use of your knowledge of the country," concluded Sir Colvin, as Terrington replaced the lantern by which he had been reading, and lay back in his chair.

"I see," he replied quietly; "but they were careful to make no use of it themselves."

"You're not in love with the trip?" asked the other.

"Oh, yes, sir, I'm charmed with it," said the younger man; "but I'm sorry for the chaps that will have to fetch us back."

"What do you mean?" asked his chief slowly.

Terrington stretched out his hand into the soft night air.

"It's summer here, sir," he said with seeming irrelevance, "and summer at Simla; summer for three full months. It's summer at Sar too; but in four weeks there will be snow on the passes, on the Palári and Darai; and, in six, whoever goes out of Sar that way," and he nodded towards India, "goes because he must."

"You think we may have to winter there?" asked Sir Colvin.

"I took a liberal view of the time we might spend there, sir, and asked at Sampur for five hundred spare rounds a man."

"Cartridges!" exclaimed the Commissioner.

"Yes, sir. Colonel Davis thought they might come in useful, and let me have what they had. Then there was a Maxim they were doubtful about-----"

"My good man!" broke in the other; "do you take this for an expeditionary force?"

"No, sir," replied the soldier. "I knew we were an escort, so I packed the Maxim on a mule. There's a corner in the old fort at Sar, I remembered, that it would look well in: and I thought, if we had to spend the winter there, we might make the place as cosy as we could. I meant to tell you, sir, as I had to requisition some extra transport, and I scheduled the lot as 'gifts for the Khan.'"

"Well, I must say you're a cool hand!" gasped his chief.

"I thought we'd be sure to let him have them if he came for them," explained Terrington simply; "so it read all right. I wasn't quite clear if a Maxim could be included under necessary equipment!"

"Oh, you weren't, weren't you," exclaimed the other. "And how do you think I'm to explain it?"

"Wouldn't it come under my knowledge of the country of which you were to make the fullest use, sir?" was the innocent reply.

Sir Colvin laughed, and the talk turned on what he held to be the peaceable possibilities of Sar. On that subject Terrington could hold nothing but his tongue. He was an adept at minding his own business, but he tried on the way up country to illuminate his chief's views of the men with whom he had to deal, by tales of Sari humour, which were mostly pointed by the decapitation or disembowelment of the humorist's best friend.

At Sar the Mission found everything in silver paper. It was met imposingly at the Gate of the Great Evil, ten miles below the city, where the river tears a way through rocks of black basalt, and had eaten there the salted cake of a sacred hospitality.

It was welcomed into Sar by the bellowings of an unspeakable music, and for three days the bearers of gifts and good wishes wore a path through the Bazar between the Residency and the New Palace.

Chantry reported a pleasing change in the Khan's bearing since the Mission had been appointed, his affability, attention to protests and anxiety for the comfort of the new comers.

Out of this very consideration arose the first note of discord, owing, as Chantry put it under his breath, to Terrington's "damned pigheadedness."

His own guard of Sikhs, Dogras and Bakót levies had been housed in the Old Palace, now called the Fort, a low mud and stone building, whose brown walls of astounding thickness rose hard upon the green tangle of chenar in which the Residency stood. The little force fitted it as scantily as a wizened kernel fits its shell, and, although the river washed the Fort's eastern face and secured that from assault, was too scant to hold it. The addition of the odd two hundred of the Commissioner's escort made defence quite another matter.

The Khan knew that, and with many apologies for the lack of accommodation in the Fort, cleared out his own barracks on the other side of the river, and put them with immense affability and the stores they contained at Chantry's disposal for the escort's occupation.

Chantry, unable ever to credit any one with less than his own share of honour, accepted gratefully on the Commissioner's behalf, glad to be relieved from a further cleansing of the Fort and from the pressing difficulty of provisions.

He explained the arrangement to Sir Colvin, as the Guides swung out of the brown mob of Saris, past the guard of honour into the Residency compound, and formed front with their own undauntable swagger before Rose Chantry's smiling eyes.

Aire listened attentively, with his eye on the frail figure in heliotrope on the verandah.

"Sounds all that's desirable," he said; "but I'm not the one to settle it. There's your man," he nodded, as Terrington rode up to report.

Terrington's hard stare swept the city as the proposal was repeated, a grim smile darkening his mouth.

"Very considerate of the old gentleman," he said slowly; "but I think we'll stay here."

Chantry exploded with difficulties. The Fort wasn't habitable; he couldn't face the question of supply; the Khan would be insulted; the difficulty of negotiations increased. He turned to Sir Colvin imploringly, but the Commissioner shook his head.

"Delegation of authority," he purred. "Mine's political!"

"But what am I to tell the Khan?" cried Chantry in expostulation. "Am I to say that you're afraid?"

Terrington's stare had included absently the other's face.

"Tell the old fox," he said, "that I'm delighted to have a political officer to make my explanations. Last time we met I had, as he'll remember, to make them myself."

He asked Sir Colvin's permission to fall the men out for dinner, and rode back without a further word about the Fort. He was unused in the matter of orders either to ask or answer questions.

Chantry made a despairing but fruitless appeal to the Commissioner, who replied that, having entrusted Terrington with absolute discretion in the military affairs of the Mission, he could not interfere.

"Good man," he concluded; "dam good man! Can talk through my Pukhtu, and cooks like a chef. You'll get used to him, if you stand in with him. But he'd clear out the devil if he got in his way."

Sir Colvin had learnt something from the daring fashion in which Terrington had held up the various Khels, ill-affected most of them, but all blandly amiable, from which the Mission had accepted hospitality on the road to Sar.

He had fixed each, as he approached it, in a grip of steel; covered its avenues, commanded its towers, as if about to exterminate a nest of hornets; but he had entered with an air of unconcerned good-fellowship, as though the rifles ranged without to avenge him and the naked steel at his elbow had no real existence.

"What's about the risk in these places?" Sir Colvin had asked on quitting one of the most forbidding.

"Never can tell," replied Terrington with a shrug. "Treachery with these chaps is like a hiccup. It often comes as a surprise, even to the man who has it."

"And don't they rather resent your precautions?"

"Oh, not a bit! they admire them. It's part of the style of a gentleman hereabouts to distrust your neighbour so explicitly that he daren't misbehave. Prevents costly mistakes. The etiquette is to show him you can murder him, and then to credit him genially with too much sense to put you to the trouble."

The etiquette was complicated, as Terrington admitted, by the lasting advantages which infidel slaughter offers to one of the True Faith, very tempting to starving and houseless hill-men, with veins fired by a seductive Paradise.

But etiquette, though worn once or twice a trifle thin, saw them safe into Sar, where Sir Colvin recognized in Terrington's insulting suspicions of his host the policy which had proved so curiously effective throughout their journey.

Its observed success made him accept more readily the difficulties entailed, especially since Terrington seemed to expect no assistance in removing them.

He set to work upon the Fort with the Bakót levies on the afternoon of his arrival, and began at the same time to organize a system of supply. He was at his desk, or directing alterations in the Fort until a late hour of the evening, eating his dinner with one hand and working with the other, so that he did not meet Rose Chantry till chota hazri next day.

A wing of the Residency had been turned into mess and ante-rooms, and furnished the Commissioner with quarters. Clones, the doctor, found lodging in another part of it, while Terrington, Walcot and Dore, his immediate subordinates, and Langford, who commanded the Sikh and Dogra detachments, made shift in an adjoining bungalow, and the native officers were sheltered by the Fort.

It was still early when Terrington, already half through his morning's work, entered the mess-room; but only Mrs. Chantry remained beside the urn. She wore a brown canvas habit, a hard straw hat, with the colours, scarlet and sage, of her husband's regiment. She looked to him absurdly young and pretty for a woman in such a place; and he was provoked by the folly which permitted her to arrive there. She was trying to look disdainfully indifferent. She was proud of being the one Englishwoman in that utmost post of the Empire, and this man alone had appeared absolutely unconscious of her presence.

"I suppose you're Captain Terrington," she said, turning towards him from the table; "as I was introduced yesterday to all the others?"

"Yes," he smiled, "I'm Nevile Terrington: and it needs no supposing to give a name to you."

"Really?" she said, reseating herself. "I shouldn't have imagined you were aware of my existence."

"All too well!" he sighed, smiling. "There is nothing I would have sooner missed in Sar."

She snapped back the tap of the samovar, and faced him in a pretty little blaze of petulance across the open teapot.

"You would turn me out now if you could, I dare say," she cried.

"This very hour," he assured her, his smile unruffled. "But I can't. 'Rien ne va plus,' as they say at another game. Do you know what that means?"

"At Monte Carlo?"

"No! in Sar? It means winter, I'm afraid."

"Winter!" she exclaimed, her resentment embarrassed by the man's imperturbable temper, and her interest provoked by his voice. "I'm going down with Sir Colvin."

"Yes!" he said. "And when will that be?"

"When he's done here."

"Yes!" he said again, "but that hardly puts a date to it. I can give you one for the snow."

"Look here!" she cried--and the little imperious words, with their little imperious manner, made suddenly a bond of battle between them--"you haven't been here a day, and you've set every one foaming. Do you know that?"

"Yes," he said humbly. "I'm afraid I've put my foot into it all round."

"Well!" she exclaimed. "Do you want me against you too?"

He shook his head gravely.

"Heaven forbid!" he said. "But you're against me already."

She rose, lifted her riding-whip from the table and took her skirt in her hand.

"Yes, I am!" she said.

She moved towards the verandah, visible through the carved screen of wood that filled a part of the wall: stopping before a quaint Cashmiri mirror that hung upon it to set her hat straight and tie her veil.

Terrington's eyes followed her as he stirred his tea.

"Where do you ride?" he asked, as she went towards the door.

She turned in the entrance, facing him, against the crimson folds of the purdah.

"Everywhere," she said.

"You'll have to give it up," he announced tranquilly.

She stood an instant longer, her lithe brown figure framed in the curtains' crimson and gold, to let him realize the defiance under her lowered eyelids and the scorn of her little lifted chin. Then she pushed back the purdah and stepped out into the sun.

III

Whatever regret may have sounded in Terrington's admission, he did nothing to mitigate the inconvenience of the boot he had thrust into Sar.

He reorganized the service of spies which had been of such use to him five years before; but the difficulties in picking up the threads, which had then been complacent to his fingers, taught him more than was told by those on which he could lay his hands.

The rise in the price of treachery, and the trivial details it could profess to furnish, warned him not only of the nearness and wide-spread intimation of an outbreak, but of a native confidence in its success. He had sufficient belief in the extractive qualities of a bribe to expect a few days' notice of the final explosion, when a knowledge of the plot should have reached the more servile of his informants. Meanwhile he could only listen to its developments in the dark.

On the surface there was no sign of trouble, save the difficulty of obtaining audience of the Khan, and his disinclination, when cornered, to talk treaties. There was much futile arrangement and re-arrangement of durbar; Mir Khan refusing to discuss politics anywhere but in the Palace, and Terrington being equally determined to provide them with quite another carpet.

Meanwhile the most amiable appearances were preserved, and polo was played three days a week on the ground beyond the Fort.

Within that gloomy building alterations of a significant kind were in progress, but the only visible addition was a dado in art paper round some of the walls.

The paper had been appropriated, from the medley of gifts collected for the Khan by some humorist at headquarters, by Terrington, who said he had a more pressing use for it.

Chantry, when he discovered that all the pressing was to be done on the mud walls of the Fort, objected petulantly to this curtailment of his stock of presents, which the Khan's policy of postponements had almost exhausted.

Terrington replied drily that the paper was marked 'sanitary,' and that the condition of the Fort when handed over to him was the reverse of that: hence his use of it.

He did not point out further that a stick drawn along the dado in a certain direction would have revealed a series of gaps in the mud work behind it; and that if the point of the stick were used vigorously to sound such gaps a lightly mortared stone would have fallen outwards from each of them, and the Fort become a better ventilated and loop-holed building.

Concealment was so essential to the undertaking that only Sir Colvin, Afzul Singh, Terrington's trusted Subadar, and the sappers who did the work were in the secret. Other noises had to be contrived to cover the daily perforations, and only in darkness could the final drilling of the walls be done: the outmost portion being replaced and the dado extended before dawn.

Sir Colvin did not appreciate these preparations; but he could not condemn them. They meant a winter's defence of Sar Fort against overwhelming odds, and that was not a pretty thing to contemplate.

An uglier one, however, was to face those odds unprepared, and be himself responsible for the improvidence.

So his consent was given, as an insurance on his reputation, but he wished that Terrington's prevision had been more accommodating or less acute.

So far, however, as the Commissioner was forced to admit, they had been justified by results. Nothing had come of the Mission, and nothing seemed to be on its way. More than a month had gone by in Sar, and though the sun still filled its sheltered valley with a summer heat, snow had fallen on the eastern passes; and, visibly from the hills about it, the everlasting whiteness of the northern peaks was spreading in frozen silence towards the plain.

Terrington had watched that whiteness, knowing what it meant, and, half ashamed of himself, hoping what it meant.

It was for the falling of that icy portcullis, he felt, that Sar was waiting: waiting till it closed across their chance of escape, across their hope of rescue.

Then the gathering conspiracy would burst: burst, as it supposed, on unprepared defenders; and the end would rest with him. It would be a siege, whatever its outcome, as great as any that had lived in story, and the man who saw it through would need no further fame.

He was a cavalryman; but this was his ideal of combat: a fight which should test every quality of manhood; a struggle through months of despairing vigilance with unconquerable hordes.