Part 2

Yet though he saw in such a siege the rare chance of a lifetime, a chance for which his life had waited, he tried with an astounding probity to make it impossible.

"I believe," he told Sir Colvin on the question of secret fortification, "I believe that we can hold Sar Fort for at least ten weeks, if my plans are carried out; but, if I may say it to you, sir, I think we have no business to try."

Asked his reason, he expressed the conviction that the game of military glory in Sar wasn't worth the candle of men's lives which would be burnt in an attempt to relieve it in mid-winter.

"Your word, then, is go?" asked the Commissioner.

"Yes, sir. Make the immediate discussion of the treaty the condition of your remaining, and let the Khan realize how his refusal will be understood.

This place can be wiped out cheaply enough next summer; but if our chaps have to slam up here through the snow they'll lose two men for every one they save."

"And how are we to go?" asked the other.

"Oh; by the Palári," replied the soldier. it "By the Palári!" exclaimed Sir Colvin. "Why the snow's over it already."

"Yes, sir; but Gale is at this end of it in Rashát. What's to happen to him if we creep out by the south?"

But the Commissioner shook his head, to Terrington's intense relief. That last argument clinched his decision. The Government which put him into the pickle must take him out of it. He was not going to fight his way home with three hundred men through the snows of the Palári and between the desolate precipices of Maristan, where once in ancient days an army had melted like the spring water upon its courses. So Terrington returned to his loopholes, and Sir Colvin to that merry little messroom in the shade of the chenar where all the trifling rites of home were observed with such an exacting deference, and the chances of the morrow debated with a boy's disdain. The dinner table, however, could show a feature which would have been unusual elsewhere, since a woman sat in its seat of honour.

When Mrs. Chantry had made over her two best rooms for the use of the Mission, its members had elected her to the presidency of their mess, and despite the charming shyness with which she took the chair she had converted it at once into a throne.

Most of her subjects would have welcomed the wildest folly on her behalf, and not one would have missed without dismay the light whiteness of her presence in the breakfast-room, or the lithe figure with its girlish shoulders which rose every evening from the square black chair at the head of the table and lifted a glass above its golden head to pledge their memories to their Queen. It is possible that, as they touched glasses against the one her white arm held across the cloth, they vowed a more immediate homage than the toast proclaimed; but then a soldier's homage has often so many vicarious shades.

Of Terrington Mrs. Chantry saw far less than of the rest. He made no occasions to meet her, and never offered himself as an escort for the rides which he had not yet proscribed. She saw him at polo--and he was worth seeing at polo--at dinner, and occasionally in the morning, when she was in time to pour out his tea.

For the remainder of the day he was buried in the Fort. But she learnt, chiefly through her husband, the part his counsel played in Sir Colvin's decisions, especially when that was, as mostly, in direct disagreement with Lewis Chantry's mind.

Of that mind his wife had never taken a too imposing measure, but she espoused it now even when obviously at fault.

She used it to provide causes for a quarrel with Nevile Terrington, and she despised it for starting her almost always in the wrong.

She would have been puzzled, perhaps, to give a reason for her enmity, and might have said that it dated from the moment she had seen him. But it had really an earlier origin--the moment when she expected, and did not see him; and it was kept alive by his absolute indifference to her beauty and her opinion.

Her supreme object was to show herself stronger than he, to thwart his plans, to make him repent having dared to ignore her.

For he would not take her seriously enough to explain his intentions. He treated her as a child; as though there were a world of things that could not be put into speech for her. He was for ever filling up spaces, where the matter was beyond her with the asterisks of a smile.

But while he was in Sar her efforts were of no avail.

Terrington could detect her secret influence in the sayings of all the men about her, even in Sir Colvin's tentative suggestions; but beyond creating a dull hostility to his plans and policy she could do nothing.

She tried to draw from him at mess some declaration that would irritate the others, but Terrington, though apparently indifferent to their irritations, only laughed at her attempts.

It was when, by a sudden intermission in the supplies on which he had counted for provisioning the Fort, Terrington was obliged to leave Sar in order to put personal persuasion on his agents in the country round, that Rose Chantry saw her chance, and took it.

The decision she could most effect was, she saw instantly, that of the Durbar.

Every one was chafing under the restrictions which Terrington had imposed; every one was anxious to have the crisis over, and the future settled one way or another. Aire's urgent representations had been shelved by a harassed Viceroy in the fatuous hope of something turning up to save expense and excuse his vacillations.

The eastern passes were already under snow, the southern would be white with it in a fortnight longer. If a winter in Sar were to be avoided something must be done at once, and, since no one but Terrington anticipated hostilities, a winter in Sar was the last thing they wished.

Rose Chantry found, in consequence, ground sown ready to her hand: and she fed it with a fertilizer which is always effective--a woman's smile at man's unvalorous hesitations.

In this case, probably, it only precipitated the harvest; but precipitation was essential.

On the third day of Terrington's absence the Durbar was proclaimed.

IV

The Durbar had been announced only a few hours previous to Terrington's return, but Rose Chantry had had the news of it from her husband on the previous evening.

Consequently, when Nevile, so long before he was expected, entered the ante-room, she was quite at home with her triumph and only surprised by the chance of thrusting it into his face.

When, half ashamed of having harried such a hungry man, she had flown into the mess-room to find food for him, Terrington sat staring at the white chunam walls, softly aglow with the sunlight that blazed outside. A window in one of them framed a space of blue sky, the greenness of a chenar, and, squatted on the ground beneath it, Rose Chantry's ayah, swinging a glass bead tied to the lowest bough. He was too tired to think of the news he had heard, or to keep his thoughts from following the woman who had told it. He realized with a numb surprise how many memories of her remained in the queer glimmer of that empty room. How much he remembered which he thought to have forgotten, and which, he was not too tired to tell himself, he ought to have forgotten.

Whichever way he looked he could see her figure in one of its airy poses, coquettishly sweet or coquettishly defiant; smiling, pouting, mocking, or fancifully grave. The other figures in those groups, men all of them, had faded; hers remained. A white spirit that filled the place for him.

He shut his eyes to shut it out; but found the likeness was on the other side of his lids.

He lifted them quickly at a laugh from the mess-room doorway through which Rose Chantry was leaning, with a tatty in either hand pressed against her shoulders and her golden head in the gap.

"Didn't mean to wake you," she said, smiling, "but there's some cold chikor. Will that do?"

"Nothing better," he replied.

"Well, you'd better have it where you are," she announced with a glance across her shoulder; "they're hanging a new ceiling cloth in here, and there's no end of a litter."

As her head withdrew with a shrill call to the kitmatgah, Sir Colvin and Chantry entered from the verandah.

The Commissioner, with the sense of nakedness which men have felt so often since the days of Eve from following a woman's counsel, wished, on learning of Terrington's arrival, to confront him personally with the news of the Durbar. So after he had seated himself and listened to what could be told him on the prospects of supply, he put the question with an exaggerated imitation of his own bluffness.

"Well! I suppose you've heard of the Durbar?"

"I'm afraid, sir," said the other, "I've been too hungry to hear of anything but breakfast. It's to be cold chikor," he added, smiling, as Rose Chantry, followed by the kitmatgah, made a muslin whiteness in the mess room-door.

She heard the cheerful lie with a flash of admiration for the man who spoke it.

So many beaten men, she knew, would have jumped at the peevish chance to hit back, especially when the hard truth to hit with was in their hands.

"Well," continued Sir Colvin, saluting Mrs. Chantry and reseating himself, as the tray was laid before Terrington, "I decided, as no reply came to my last demand, some sort of move must be made at once, if we weren't to be boxed here all the winter. So, as there was no chance of ferreting the Khan out of that hole of his, we're going to talk him into reason over there."

Terrington, with his knife in the partridge, looked up and nodded.

"I suppose the plan's no more to your mind than ever?" queried the Commissioner.

"No, sir," said his military adviser. "I think it's even less."

"How! from what you've heard?" exclaimed Sir Colvin.

"No," said the soldier slowly; "from what I haven't heard. There's no talk in the hills; and when a Sari man's dumb, he's either got something to say, or something not to say it."

"Hang it all!" cried Chantry. "I wonder if there's anything that you wouldn't think a bad sign?"

Aire shrugged his shoulders.

"Well! the die's cast," he said; "and we've got to see the thing through. The only question left is one of escort. We want to look imposing but not belligerent. What do you think?"

"The smaller the better," said Terrington drily.

"Why?"

"You can't take enough to make it safe for you," explained the other; "but you can take enough to make it unsafe for us."

"For _you_?" Sir Colvin asked.

"Suppose you don't come back?" was Terrington's reply.

"Gad! but you're a cheerful counsellor," cried Chantry hotly.

"If they murder us, eh," said Aire.

"And you think they mean to, Captain Terrington?" asked Rose Chantry.

Terrington shook his head.

"Not to-morrow!" he said. "Mir Khan wouldn't expect to get the chance."

"You mean he doesn't believe we're such unqualified fools as to go there?" Sir Colvin suggested.

"That's probably how he puts it," said Terrington blandly.

"Well that gives us a chance the more," Chantry threw in.

"A chance the less, I think," said Terrington. "Blood is always a Sari man's first thought, and he'll leave no time for a second."

The agent's dark eyes glowered with a whole-souled malediction, but Sir Colvin, tapping on the table, watched in silence for some seconds while Terrington finished his meal.

"Do you still try to dissuade me?" he asked at length.

"Not at all, sir," replied the other. "I was only thinking of the escort. If they mean murder over there they'll mean it the more the more of you there are."

"Why?"

"Supposing they intend to go for us, they'll wait till all the passes are closed, and we're cut off. In that case they'll hardly give away their game now, unless they get a chance to cripple us."

"Twenty men would be enough?"

"Ample," said Terrington. "And I'd keep as many of them outside as possible."

"Yes; and you might pick some of your own men for the job."

Terrington's face hardened. His men were his children, and he hated to let them run a risk which he could not share.

"In that case I'd ask the honour of going with you, sir," he said.

Sir Colvin shook his head.

"No, no!" he answered. "The Fort is your business, and it may prove a big one. Chantry is going in with me, and Langford, who's an old cavalryman, will take the escort. I've sent down word of what I'm doing, but I'll leave a fuller account with you, in case anything goes wrong." He turned with Chantry to leave the room, calling back from the doorway: "By the way, the polo's to come off to-morrow afternoon as we arranged. You're playing, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir," replied the other, watching the two figures pass out of the verandah, and seem to shrink as they were immersed in the fierce yellow of the sun.

Then he turned, and met Rose Chantry's eyes.

She had flung herself into a long chair: her knees were crossed; her head thrown back; her hands clasped behind it. To Terrington's vision the tip of her toe, her knee and her chin were in a line; and the absurd little sole of her shoe, with its elfin instep and the arch curl of its heel, made a print on his memory in which it was afterwards to tread.

"Well!" she said, with her tantalizing smile, "was the chikor good?"

"Excellent," he answered.

Her lips fluttered like the wings of a bird.

"Didn't it taste of defeat?" she suggested, the dark lids drooping over her eyes.

"No," he said gravely, "it tasted extremely game."

She swept him with her covert glances, but his had fallen to her foot.

"Why did you tell that lie?" she asked presently.

He looked up into her face for an instant.

"I've forgotten," he said.

"Sir Colvin wouldn't have suspected me," she added. "He knows no more about a woman than ... than you do.

"I suppose that leaves him without much knowledge to boast of?" he reflected.

"Yes," she said; "it does."

She tilted her head sideways to see, beyond her knee, on what his eyes were fixed. She tossed her foot clear of the muslin flounces, and then with a curious twist of the ankle brought it round into her view.

"What's wrong with it?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"How should I know?" he said thoughtfully. "It wasn't made for me."

She laughed, slowly twirling her foot, as though fascinated by its suppleness, or by the gleaming creases of the silk that covered it. Then, with a little jerk of her knee, she let it settle again into the froth of flounces.

"Really," she said, "for a man who says so little, you do say the strangest things."

His eyes had wandered again to the square of open air, the picture in azure and ochre and emerald which the window made in the wall. The brown woman still sat swinging her bead in the shade of the chenar. Terrington could see its glassy blueness as it dipped to and fro across a splinter of sunlight.

Rose Chantry, with her eyes on his profile, asked him at what he was looking.

He told her.

"I know!" she exclaimed. "Why is she always doing that?"

"She wants a child," he said.

"But she has one."

"Another then."

She gave a shudder.

"What strange things women are!" she cried.

His eyes came round to her, and she felt a coldness in them like the green gleam of ice.

"Out here, you see," he said quietly, "women are still as fond of making men as of making fools of them."

"Why do you say that?" she asked sharply.

"I could think of nothing better," he replied.

"Why did you say it to _me_?" she persisted.

"To whom else could I have said it?" he enquired blandly.

The blaze of anger seemed to fill her eyes with a floating sparkle of fresh colours, and her lips closed tightly, as though to repress a desire to bite him. Then she met his glance and laughed.

"I wonder why you dislike me so," she said.

"I don't dislike you," he replied.

"Oh, well!" she sighed, "why don't you dislike me, then; since you seem too? You wish I wasn't here!"

"Very much," he admitted.

"Why? What harm do I do?"

"Haven't you told me that this morning?"

"No!" she cried. "You weren't thinking of that; you know you weren't. You believe that would have happened anyhow. It was what you meant about making fools of men."

"Well," he said, "don't you make fools of them?"

She shook her head softly.

"My mistake then," he said.

"Ah!" she sighed, "but you don't think so. I daresay you think something much more horrid of me than you care to say. And it ought to have been rather nice for you all, having me up here."

"Yes," he said, "I think it ought."

She looked at him doubtfully, crumpling her lips together in her fingers.

"But you _do_ make mistakes," she went on retrospectively.

"Yes," he said, "one makes everything of them."

She regarded him for a moment in the light of the remark, before adding:

"You told me, the first time you saw me, I must give up riding."

"Yes," he admitted, smiling; "that was one of them. But I found that your riding could be of use to us."

"Of use to _you_?" she exclaimed.

"Yes, in creating a false impression."

"An impression of what?"

"Of security: that we did not think you were in any danger."

"Though you thought I was?"

"I was sure of it," he said.

She was sitting upright now; her hands set upon the chair-arms; her face changing stormily between anger and astonishment.

"You were sure I was in danger, yet you did nothing to prevent it!" she cried. "Do you mean that?"

"What should I have done?" he enquired.

"Warned me!" she said

"But didn't I?"

"Oh, that!" she exclaimed impatiently.

"And would you have been warned?"

"I don't know. I can't say. That's got nothing to do with it. Or you could have given me an escort."

He shook his head.

"That would have made you no safer, and would have spoilt you as an advertisement."

"As an advertisement!" she protested hotly. "Do soldiers let a woman run the risk of being murdered to make things safe far them? I think it's contemptible!"

"Yes," he said quietly; "so I see: but you don't think enough."

He sat looking at her in a way she detested; as no other man seemed able to look at her; as though she were a piece in a game he played.

"Did any one else know it wasn't safe for me?" she demanded.

He shook his head.

"Wouldn't you have been warned in that case?" he suggested.

"Yes," she returned warmly, "I'm quite certain I should."

"I think so too," he said. "Nothing in Sar would have been weighed beside it."

"Except by you," she retorted.

"Except by me," he said. "You see I'm here to weigh things. I'm here to look after you all. You think I should have told you of your danger, and shut you up in the safety of Sar. But there is no safety in Sar. That's the mistake. Your riding was a risk, but it helped our chance to make Sar safer; safer for every one, safer for _you_."

"And suppose I had been killed?"

"Well," he said, "you can fancy what I should have paid for it. But the safety would have been there, though it was only there for others. And it was to make that that I am here."

She met his musing observation of her with hard clear eyes.

"Haven't you wasted an unusual lot of time talking to me this morning, Captain Terrington?" she said.

He took the deep breath of a man whose heart is sick for sleep, and threw back his shoulders.

"Yes," he smiled, rising; "I was quite exceptionally tired."

V

Terrington gave a practical shape to his forebodings as soon as the Commissioner and his escort started for the Durbar.

The entire force was under arms; the Residency guard was trebled; sappers were stationed in every room to break open the loopholes; others waited with discs of guncotton to blow away the trees which masked the polo ground; and the final connexions were made with the mine which was to overthrow the courtyard wall.

Appearances were kept up by an attenuated fatigue party, which was as markedly visible about the place as the rest of the garrison was not.

Terrington, who had changed for polo, also made a peacefully indifferent figure as he strolled across to the mess-room and round the Residency garden, with a loose coat drawn over his riding-shirt, whose blue and silver showed in the scarf about his throat.

He had returned to his orderly-room in the Fort, when news of the tragedy which was to wring from England a growl of vengeance was brought to the sentries at the Residency gate by the handful of blood-smeared horsemen who swept through it with broken and clotted lances and a crimson lather on their horses' flanks.

Hussain Shah was holding Langford, mortally hurt, in the saddle, his huge figure swinging limply to and fro, and more than half that remnant of the escort reeled as they drew rein before the Residency door.

Terrington was not the first to hear of the disaster, but he heard it in the most dramatic fashion; from Mrs. Chantry's lips.

She had torn across the compound as the Lancers came to a blundering halt before the mess-room entrance, and dashed breathless into the orderly room, waiting no confirmation of the story that was told by their plight.

She caught at her side, clutching with the other hand at the table, and for an instant panted, speechless, her face white as jasmine, above a big bow of creamy lace.

Then, with a hard gasp of breath:

"They're killed!" she cried.

Terrington had sprung to his feet as she burst in upon him.

"Who are?" he demanded.

"Lewis and Sir Colvin," she panted, "and ... and most of the others. All but six or seven of them. Mr. Langford's there, but he's simply hacked; and all the men are streaming."

A long thin wail broke from her with the horror of what she had seen, and she covered her eyes with both her hands.

Terrington had stepped towards the doorway as he realized the significance of what she had seen. She put herself sharply in front of him, her head flung fiercely back.

"What are you going to do?" she demanded. "You let them go like that, you _made_ them go like that! That's what's done it all! You wouldn't let them take the men! Aren't you going to try to save them? They mayn't be dead! Don't you think they mayn't be dead? If only you'll go at once; this moment! Take every one and smash them. Don't you think it's possible; just possible? And it wasn't I who did it, was it? was it really?"

He laid a hand upon her shoulder to put her aside.

"No, child," he said gently; "you had nothing to do with it."

As he would have passed out, leaping footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Captain Walcot almost dashed into his arms.

"Have you heard?" he cried.

"What?" asked Terrington

Walcot glanced with deprecation at Mrs. Chantry's figure.

"Say what you know!" said Terrington.

"Sir Colvin and Chantry have been murdered at the Durbar, and all the men they took in with them."

"Who told you?" said Terrington.

"Hussain Shah," replied the other excitedly. "Langford was in the courtyard with half the escort, when a yelling began inside the hall, and a swarm of those brown swine poured out shouting that Sir Colvin was killed, and attacked him. Langford charged, and tried to jam them in the doorway; but the crowd joined in behind, and when Langford was shot through the body Hussain retired 'em, and they had to cut their way through till they were clear of the Bazaar. Every man of them was wounded, and they've lost five and Langford's dying."

"Is Clones with him?"

Walcot nodded.

Terrington remained a moment without speaking, gazing almost absently through the window in the thick mud wall at the green grove of chenar. In his loose racing-coat above polo boots and breeches, and with the gay silk scarf at his throat, he suggested anything but a man suddenly met by a great emergency.