Part 3

"Tell Subadar Afzul Singh," he said slowly, "to post the Fort guard, break out the loopholes and put the place at once in a state of defence. You will parade every other available man in the courtyard within half an hour, in marching order a hundred and fifty rounds a man. Dore will take over Langford's Sikhs and Dogras; the Bakót levies will reinforce the Fort guard. Send Risaldar Hussain Shah to me here."

Rose Chantry held her sobbing breath in astonishment at the note of control which had come into the man's voice. It was lower and softer than she had ever heard it, but it spoke with a quiet and assured authority which seemed to master her even while it addressed another.

Walcot felt it too. He was the elder of the two men, and but a few months junior in the service; they had lived together for some time on terms of perfect equality, yet now, though Terrington had made no reference to a change in their relations, Walcot's heels came together while the other was speaking, and his hand went to his cap with a "Very good, sir" as Nevile ended.

The phrase, the sudden change of relation, Walcot's retreating figure, disciplined and subordinate, produced on Rose Chantry a very curious effect.

"Are you going to take over the command?" she said to Terrington, who had seated himself at his desk and was writing rapidly.

He turned his head and looked at her, his mind evidently occupied with an interrupted thought.

"I have taken it over," he said quietly, turning again to his pen.

She watched him for a moment. His silence, his unconcern, his power, were all alike beyond her.

"Are you going to the Palace?" she asked at length.

He looked round at her again, as clearly preoccupied as before, but without irritation.

"You will save them, won't you, if you can?" she went on imploringly, to force the subject into his mind.

"Yes," he said slowly, "I'm going to the Palace." Then after a pause, but with his eyes still upon her, "Mr. Clones would probably be very glad of some help with the wounded."

"The wounded!" she repeated with a little shudder.

"Yes," he said; "you'll see a good deal of them during the next few days, and it's as well to be of use. If you'll take this to him," he went on, folding up a note, "he'll show you what to do. It's only the making up of bandages," he continued, as she held back; "the time left us is very short."

Something scornful had come into his voice, though ever so faintly, and something compelling as well. She took the note when he held it out to her, unable, despite her will, to do anything else. As she passed the doorway Hussain Shah appeared on the landing beyond it, the folds of the turban above his temple stiff with blood. She paused an instant to hear Terrington's greeting, but the greeting was in Pukhtu, which she did not understand. Had she understood, her opinion of Terrington's hardness would have been confirmed, for no reference was made to the wounded man's condition until he had received his orders.

"Are you fit for duty?" said Terrington simply.

"I am unhurt, sir," replied the other as he saluted.

Half an hour later every available man in the force was paraded in the courtyard of the Fort. Walcot with his Lancers in front; then, behind Terrington, the Sikhs and Dogras that could be spared from the Fort, the Guides bringing up the rear. The Maxim had been hoisted on to the roof of the Eastern Tower, whence it covered for a certain distance an advance on the Palace. In the silence the blow of a pick could be heard, and the falling stones from the last loopholes in the walls.

Terrington sat his horse immovably, waiting for the signal from Afzul Singh which should open the gates. He was burning with a dull anger against the circumstance in which he had been placed, and against the folly of the men who had created it. He knew that in marching on the Palace to demand the men who had entered it that morning he was imperilling the safety of his entire force; yet he knew, too, that sentimental England would never forgive his sanity in declining the risk should any of Sir Colvin's party happen to be still alive. He had no hope of their safety. He was too well acquainted with the temper in which they had been attacked. That he viewed with no resentment whatever. It had been a piece of the foulest treachery, but treachery was a virtue in Sar, and he was quite able to accept, and even to respect, alien standards of conduct.

What did anger him was the stolid British arrogance which declined to make allowance for any prejudices but its own, and thought beneath its dignity all considerations which were not in the terms of its own intelligence. Rose Chantry watched him from the orderly-room window which overlooked the courtyard. She had been in the surgery helping Clones to make up first-aid bandages, but the tramp of laden men down the long passages, and the roll, like a soft volley, of grounded butts in the dust as the men fell in, so wrought on her excitement that she left her work and ran up the narrow twisted stairs to the room from which half an hour earlier Terrington had sent her.

She watched him now, with her shoulder pressed against the yellow chunam wall and her head drawn back in order not to be seen, wondering how a man of his dominant authority could wait impassively at such a moment the arrangements of a subordinate.

Her eyes, dry and hot, seemed almost to repudiate resentfully the tears which she had shed; a pulse throbbed like the flutter of a moth at her throat; her uneasy fingers seemed to crave to be closed, and yet when she clenched her fist they ached to be opened. She longed to tear about, to give orders, to rouse enthusiasm. She would have liked to ride beside Terrington to the Palace and carry a flag: and the thought of how he would regard such a proposal moved her not to a sense of its humour but to renewed irritation with the man who could ride as indifferently to death as he would to a dinner.

Her whole being was in disorder owing to the uncertainty of her husband's fate. At the first shock and accepted inference of his death tears had burst from her in the weak wretchedness of bereavement, the sense of widowhood, and grief at the dying of one so near to her in the pride of his youth. It was perhaps the very nearness of death's-knife, the cutting off of the one who was one with her, who had scarcely gone from her arms, which gave her the keenest shudder. The sword which had been thrust through him seemed almost to have pricked her breast. Not that she feared for her own safety; she never imagined that it was compromised. She had the supreme British scorn for her country's foes, and thought it was only a question of policy whether Terrington with his handful of men would not at once burn the Palace to the ground, carry off the Khan in chains, and ravage the whole country with sword and fire.

It was death in the shadow which had stabbed and was gone which made her shiver. A thing so swift, so sudden, so unforeseen mocked the comfortable security of life.

But with the fitting out of the expedition and speculation on the possible safety of those in the Palace, her emotions became dreadfully perplexed. She had perforce to cease mourning a husband who might be still alive, and with the disappearance of a reason for her sorrow she began to wonder what had caused it.

Had she cried because she loved him or because he was killed? She had not a doubt while she thought him dead, but the chance of his being alive seemed to have altered everything. Last night she would have disowned indignantly the idea that she did not love him. She had accepted him as naturally in the order of needful things as food and clothing. He was her husband and so had everything that husbands have, did everything that husbands do. She had never thought about it as a personal matter. One had a husband as one had a cold in the head; one didn't always quite know why; but having him one accepted him for the sort of thing he was.

Lewis had taken her from a life already wearily dull, and with every prospect of becoming duller. He had come suddenly into her existence--a quite unlooked-for excitement; and had transplanted her into surroundings more exciting still; full of men, and dangers, and pageants and great affairs. It was so full indeed, that in the press of things to do he was a good deal crowded out. His work, his fresh appointments--for he had been tremendously in demand--gave him rather the air of continually arranging new scenes and effects in which she played the leading lady.

She didn't in the least so consciously regard him; she had not even noticed how much his work kept him out of the occasions which she most enjoyed; he seemed just a part of the delightful movement, a sort of dashing high-spirited hot-tempered ambitious concentration of it all. He was the man who had made it all possible for her, being her husband. That was how, gratefully, she most often thought of him.

His death wrenched her by its treacherous horror; but it had put no awkward questions. The questions came with the doubt if he were dead. How much did she care for him? Did she care for him at all? Had she ever cared for him as a husband? Right on the heels of that, answering it to her astounded perception, came a shrinking of disgust that she had lived three years with a man as his wife without loving him; without even discovering that she did not love him. It was that which seared the tears in her eyes, and left her with a sense of shame and self-disdain and loneliness indescribable.

It was that too in a curious reflected fashion which increased her anger at Terrington's quiet indifference to the ways of Fate. She could picture Lewis Chantry's raging vehemence under a like provocation.

As she watched the silent mass of men in the courtyard--the dull yellow of the field-service kit lightened by the gay alkalaks of the Lancers, the orange and white of their pennons, the glistening of the sun upon lance-head and bayonet, the silence broken only by the clink of a bridoon as some impatient horse flung up its head--there was a burst of blue and red above the eastern tower and the Union Jack flew out above the Fort.

It was the signal that Afzul Singh had completed his defences. Walcot rode back to Terrington and saluted. Terrington nodded. With a sparkle of light on their lances, the horsemen were in the saddle, the rifles leapt to the 'carry,' and were swung on to the shoulder, cresting the infantry with the shimmer of steel; the gates were thrown open, the Lancers passed through and extended, the Sikhs and Dogras wheeled outwards after them in column of fours, followed by the Guides.

As the gates closed behind the last section a sharp explosion rang out, followed by others in quick succession.

Rose Chantry started and stood quivering in tense excitement; then darted across the room to the further window, which looked towards the polo ground through a green fringe of chenar.

As she reached it there was another rending uproar almost under her feet, and a tree leapt into the air from beneath the window and fell with a crashing ruin of its branches towards the river.

Afzul Singh was converting the screen of chenar into an abattis with discs of gun cotton, but to Rose the trees seemed to be falling before the enemy's shells, and she ran hurriedly to the eastern tower to get a view of the besiegers, and found there Afzul Singh himself, who explained her mistake.

A sand-bag revetment crowned the top of the tower, and the loopholes on either side of the Maxim were manned by picked shots. All were intently watching the occasional glimpse of colour or gleam of steel which marked the progress of Terrington's force through the Bazaar.

Now that the din of the detonations had ceased not a sound broke the silence; the city lay listless and without a sign of life in the haze of its noontide heat. The dust rose on the heels of the column as it emerged from the Bazaar and filtered through the collection of low mud buildings beyond it. Clear of these, Terrington swung his right at once on to the river, and the whole of his little force could be seen for the first time as it extended and moved forward across the space of open ground to the east of the Palace. It looked painfully small for its job, like an ant attacking a mouse, even though Terrington made it as imposing as he could without sacrificing its compactness. The ground, flat as a floor from the river to the foot-hills, gave no command for rifle fire over the centre of the town, and Terrington had no choice but to march straight at the wall which surrounded the Khan's buildings, and chance their being defended. It was a dangerous piece of work, and Afzul Singh never lowered his glasses till the doubtful part of it was done.

But Terrington showed at once the temper in which he had undertaken it. His cavalry wheeled to the left, leaving the front open, and, advancing, formed a screen which covered the skirts of the town. The river protected the other flank, and, with the Guides in the centre as reserve, the Sikhs went straight for the eastern gate, while the Dogra detachment advanced half right upon the Palace stables where the wall ran down to the river. The guards on the gate allowed themselves to be taken, the stables were occupied without resistance, and a command was thus obtained of the Palace compound which was seen to be invitingly empty. But Terrington was the last man to be tempted by such an invitation. He had obtained a foothold from which to enforce his demands, and did not intend to go a step further.

He could not hope to carry the Palace, filled as it doubtless was with the Khan's guards; he had no guns to batter it; but he could now, if his hand was forced, make life very uncomfortable for those within its walls. So he began to parley.

What passed was hidden by the Palace wall from the watchers on the tower, but after three hours of apprehension they could see that the force was preparing to retire, and presently some of the Khan's bearers appeared through the gateway carrying charpoys. Afzul Singh guessed what was on them, and his grave consideration made no disguise with Mrs. Chantry. He had no hope that any of those who had been trapped in the Palace would return alive, and he held out none to her.

"None come," he said, lowering his glasses; "they are all carried."

Terrington had requested the return of Sir Colvin and his escort, and, on the reply that they were killed, had demanded their bodies.

Mir Khan, informed by his spies that the Fort had been loop-holed, provisions stored, the trees levelled and every preparation made for a prolonged siege, foresaw with a chuckle the very imminent destruction of the British force in Sar, and was far too astute to hurry a game which was going his own way.

So he tendered the bodies with every mark of respect and the most profound apologies for the passions of his subjects which he had been unable to keep under control.

Terrington had replied acknowledging the arrival of the charpoys and announcing that he was for the present the British representative in Sar, and would, on receiving instructions from his Government, acquaint the Khan what reparation was demanded for the murder at a friendly Durbar of Her Majesty's Commissioner.

The old man, when the message was read to him, rubbed his foot and smiled with child-like craftiness. He admired the daring which had flung that handful of the Sirkar's men without an hour's hesitation against his Palace; admired it the more since it seemed to prove that Terrington was after all but a swine-headed fighter like the rest of his kind.

VI

Terrington brought back his men with an undiminished precaution, Mir Khan's affability merely increasing his distrust, and Afzul Singh, his equal in subtlety and in knowledge of the foe, had prepared a sally should the force require assistance in getting out of the Bazaar. Mir Khan, however, to his own everlasting regret, held his hand, so that the little expedition returned without a shot fired, and the gates of the Fort were shut and barred behind it. Afzul Singh had been already entrusted with the duty of putting every alien out of the Fort, but to prevent more securely the escape of information, the guards were strengthened, and sentries patrolled the entire front of the Fort with orders to shoot any man attempting to enter or leave it before dawn.

When the men were dismissed Terrington called Walcot and Dore into the women's durbar hall and sent for Hussain Shah and Afzul Singh, who were the two senior native officers.

"I should like to break the news to Mrs. Chantry if I may," said Walcot in the doorway.

"The news?" enquired Terrington.

"Of her husband's death," Walcot explained.

Terrington's face showed a certain blankness of apprehension. He had forgotten that there was any one in the Fort, whose hopes or fears could be affected by the confirmation obtained of that morning's tragedy.

"Oh, certainly," he said.

The room was a long gloomy one on the ground floor, used by Langford partly as an office, partly as a store. Bales and boxes still filled two of its corners, and the space in front of them was littered with Sir Colvin's and the Chantrys' belongings, which were being removed from the Residency with ostentation. One dark window in the further wall lent what dim light the room had, and the table at which Terrington seated himself was drawn somewhat towards it.

He was writing when the two native officers entered, and he assigned to them the two seats on his right, with the grave silent courtesy with which the East had coloured so curiously his English manner. Dore, nervously tired by the excitement of the morning, had dropped limply on to a bale of clothing, and lit a cigarette, but the two Sikhs sat erect and impassive beside the table. Clones came in to requisition some stores, and reported Langford to be insensible and sinking.

"If you can spare a few moments you might spend them here," said Terrington.

The doctor nodded, and sat down on a packing-case beside Dore, rising again at once as Mrs. Chantry, followed by Walcot, entered the room.

She was wearing still the frock of creamy lace in which she was to have watched the polo that afternoon. Her face looked listless and white and faded above it like a broken flower. Her eyes sought Terrington's in the dim room with a sort of frightened submissiveness.

"May I come in?" she said.

"Of course," he answered, getting out of his chair to hand it to her; but Walcot had already drawn forward a seat of Sari rush from the relics of the Residency, and she dropped into it limply, with a nod of acknowledgment to Terrington, amid all the crushed and huddled fragments of her own lost little home. Walcot sat down on a box beside her. A tiny jade god slid down the pile of rugs and bowls and cushions, and lay at her feet with a severed arm. He had been for years the very dearest of her household treasures, and now to find him maimed and friendless moved in her a despondent misery which she had not felt at her husband's death. She hid the little broken body in the hollow of her hand, and sat there, her head bent over it, shaking with sobs. It was the very smallness of the grief that brought her tears.

Terrington blotted the notes he had written and laid down his pen. He made no sort of preamble: for anything in his manner the occasion might have been the most ordinary in the world.

"I wish," he said, "to explain my plans. Some of us may not come through the next few weeks, and I don't want those who do to be saddled with my mistakes. So I'll enter any protest, to cover you in case I'm not with you at the finish. We leave Sar to-night."

Even the two dark impassive faces on his right reflected the unexpectedness of his announcement, and Walcot half rose to his feet.

"Abandon the Fort?" he exclaimed.

"Abandon the Fort, and everything we cannot carry, and retire by the Palári upon Rashát," said Terrington quietly.

"But I understood, if you'll excuse me," continued Walcot, trying to control his excitement, "that all the defences of the Fort which we've been at for the last month were your idea."

"They were," said Terrington.

"Have you changed your mind then?" asked the other sharply.

"No," said Terrington slowly, "but I've changed my position. I've only so far had to decide how to make the Fort defensible if it had to be defended."

"Yes, but!" Walcot objected, "the clearing of the Residency, the blowing down of these trees; all that has taken place since! What's been the object of that if you didn't mean to stay?"

"In war," said Terrington quietly, "it's sometimes as well to keep your intentions from the enemy."

"Did Sir Colvin mean us to stay here, sir?" enquired Dore.

"Yes," said Terrington. "Sir Colvin intended to hold out in Sar if anything went wrong till a relieving force could get up here from Sampur."

"You absolutely disagree with him, then?" Walcot rapped out.

Terrington looked at him thoughtfully.

"I have another point of view," he said.

"And what's that?" snapped the other.

"He was a political officer and I am a soldier," said Terrington simply.

Dore turned his shoulder upon Walcot, with a wrinkle of annoyance at his carping note.

"Don't you think we could hold Sar, sir?" he asked with boyish eagerness for a stand-up fight.

"Yes," said Terrington, kindling sympathetically at the thought of the fight he too had longed for, "I think we just could, though it might be a near thing. I've decided to clear out," he went on, addressing the others, "because the value of being penned up here doesn't impress me politically, and because digging us out of this in mid-winter would mean a horrible waste of life. There are only a few hundred of us to be wiped out at the worst, but it might take thousands of the men who came to save us. These little sieges are often very costly things."

"I shouldn't think our retirement will be very popular at home," Clones suggested.

"I don't suppose it will," said Terrington; "at home they're rather fond of a siege; it makes the paper more interesting."

"And how about the intentions of the Government, Colonel," Clones continued in his reasonable way; "I suppose you were sent up here to carry them out."

"No doubt," said Terrington with his grave smile, "but without being told what its intentions were. Consequently one rather seems to be here to make intentions for the Government, and I'm very possibly making them all wrong. But that's their fault for not having sent a better man."

"There's one point, Terrington, you don't seem to have considered," Walcot interjected; "that you've got to take a woman over passes which even the natives won't cross at this time of year."

"I haven't considered it for a moment," said Terrington shortly.

Walcot's face curdled with anger.

"That's hardly been the habit of Englishmen hitherto out here," he exclaimed.

"I dare say not," said Terrington with dry indifference.