Part 4

Rose Chantry, with her hand still closed about the little broken god in her lap, looked up at him through the tears that hung across her eyes. Beyond the cool darkness of the entrance door, against the far wall of the blazing courtyard she could see the row of charpoys with their burden of dead men, mere rolls of sallow dungari cloth, waiting till the grave being dug beside the Residency gate should be wide enough to hold them. It was the most dreadful moment of her life, when she needed above all to be petted and comforted into a sense of her importance, but the man who should have done it was indifferent even to her safety. She had already begun to cheer herself with the thought of a siege; the delicacy of her position; the solicitous homage of all the men; her cheerful and inspiring effect upon them; the excitement in England so intensified by the presence of a woman among the besieged; the accounts of her in the papers, made more touching by her loss; and then the thrill of the relief--she took the relief for granted--the sound of the guns, the fight through the streets of Sar, the cheers of the British troops, the ardent congratulations, the soft abandonment of that moment at the end of the suspense, and herself the one woman in a British army. And the coming home after such an experience; the woman of the moment, every one wanting to meet her; perhaps a command from the Queen.

All her dream was shattered by Terrington's implacable decree. She looked at him with despairing hate. She thought of the reckless sacrifices Englishmen had made for women during the Mutiny, and hated him the more. She felt sure that she could never live through the snows of those passes about which she had heard such awful stories. The cold would kill her; the cold always shrivelled her up; and she had nothing to wear, nothing warmer than was wanted for an Indian winter.

And that very morning, only a few hours back, as the party started for the Durbar, she had exulted in her triumph over him, she whose folly had given everything into his hand!

What ages it seemed since Lewis had swung buoyantly into his saddle, and Sir Colvin, ruddy and cheery, had waved her an "au revoir." Now they were rolls of yellow dungari lying out there in the sun.

In her absorption of self-pity she scarcely heard Captain Walcot's expressions of dissent from his leader's plans, which were more forcible than soldierly. He was seething with wrath at Terrington's treatment of her, and Terrington, aware of his excitement, but quite at fault as to its cause, heard him with determined patience.

"And by which pass do you mean to retire?" he exclaimed at last, unable to shake Terrington's resolve.

"By the Palári," said the other.

"The Palári!" cried Walcot derisively. "Why, it's the worst pass on this side of the Pamir. May I ask why you've chosen it?"

"Have you been through the Palári or Darai?" Terrington enquired.

"No."

"Then you can hardly appreciate why I've chosen it," said Terrington quietly. "The Palári is the only one which we've a chance of reaching without being cut off; it's the only one not commanded from above at this time of year, and Freddy Gale, holding this end of it at Rashát, is absolutely done for unless we dig him out."

His reasons were listened to by the room in absorbing silence. Then Walcot blurted out:

"Is this a council of war?"

"No," said Terrington; "it's an opportunity for protest. I wished to put your advice on record, but I didn't propose to take it."

Walcot thereupon declared himself emphatically in favour of remaining in Sar; Dore followed him less assertively. Clones gave a shrug of his shoulders.

"It's all one to me where I doctor you," he smiled.

Terrington turned to the two men beside him, who had sat, immovably attentive, throughout the discussion.

"We are as the print of thy footsteps," said Afzul Shah, and Hussain nodded.

Terrington wrote for some moments, then read aloud his own dispositions and the objections which had been urged against retirement. His own plans and reasons were very bluntly outlined, but he gave the case for the occupation of Sar with a fulness and cogency that astonished its advocates, who did not suspect how dear the scheme had been to his ambition, nor what its abandonment had cost him.

He handed the paper to Walcot.

"Will you sign it?" he said.

The best that was in the other man responded instinctively to such treatment:

"You've put it a long way stronger than I could myself," he said, taking up the pen.

VII

Langford came back to consciousness an hour before he died, and Terrington sat beside him to the end, writing instructions to cover every detail of the departure while he spoke and listened to the dying man. Langford was a fine horseman and a very capable soldier, and the only one of his subordinates on whose decision Terrington could rely. He had left in India an uncompleted love affair but he spoke of nothing in his last moments but the safety of the force.

"You'll have to watch those Bakót chaps," he murmured, "there's no fight in 'em." And again with more difficulty. "Those beggars 'll cut you off at the Sorágh Gul; get round by the Bewal road. You'll have to smash 'em there." His mind was evidently away with the retreating troops. His grip tightened on Terrington's hand. "If only I could go along with you, old man. Oh, it's hard to come to grief at the first hurdle."

He shut his eyes with that inconsolable sigh, and it was his unconscious soul that whispered, "Give my love to Helen," with the last beats of his heart.

Terrington went on writing as Langford's head fell back, then he loosened the dead man's fingers from his hand, and left the room. The sheer pressure of thought seemed to have squeezed out of him the power of feeling.

In the women's durbar hall he found Walcot and Mrs. Chantry turning over the litter of the Residency rooms.

Terrington had left the porterage of the reserve ammunition to Walcot's arrangement, and had been expecting his report for half an hour. Walcot had, however, considered the packing of Mrs. Chantry's boxes of more importance.

The expression of Terrington's opinion on his preference was a good deal tempered by Mrs. Chantry's presence; but even so was caustic enough to burn itself into Walcot's memory.

As he left the hall without a word, Rose Chantry lifted an Afghan poshteen from the heap beside her.

"Did you send me this?" she asked.

It was lined with astrachan, and exquisitely embroidered, and was the most valuable of Terrington's few possessions.

"Yes," he said, "it was the only warm thing I could get for you. You will want everything you can wear, and you can put that on over a good deal. There are some boots to come."

She did not know that he had sent her the thing of which he had most need himself, and his giving had about it no air of gallantry; but the proof that he had thought of her at a moment when he had to think of everything touched her far more than had Walcot's voluble commiseration.

She held out her hand to him and tried to speak, but her throat closed and her lips trembled.

He took her hand in both of his.

"Poor, poor thing!" he said.

Gholam Muhammed entered with the long lamb-lined boots at that moment and laid them with a salaam in front of her.

They had been made for Terrington and were long enough to reach to a man's knee, and Rose, whose every breath at the moment compromised with a sob, thrust out her pretty foot beside them with unconscious coquetry.

"Oh, that's all right," said Terrington, smiling; "they'll go over the others. You'll not find them a bit too big."

He lifted one, with its tassels and showy crimson calf, and, taking her wrist as if she had been a child, thrust her hand down through the woolly lining which almost filled the top.

The loose sleeve slid back to her elbow against the leather edge, and as she looked into his face with a surprised compliance, something in the softness of the curling silken warmth against her skin touched her suddenly beyond her power of control. She snatched her arm away from him, and, flinging herself upon the heap of curtains and cushions, burst into tears.

Terrington, completely at fault, made no attempt to console her. He knew when to leave a man unhindered and to give a horse its head, and the instinct helped him with a woman's tears. He stood watching her sobbing shoulders, and the shadows on her golden hair, but his thoughts, the instant they were freed from her, flew forward to the forcing of the Sorágh Gul, the double-headed defile on the road to Rashát, where he knew Mir Khan could intercept him and compel him to face an attack from three sides at once. He tried to compel his memory to yield some details of the position which he might turn to account, for his own field-sketches only supplied features which would be useful to the enemy.

The sinking of Rose Chantry's sobs brought his mind back to the dim hall. He put his hand gently on her shoulder.

"What was it, child?" he said.

She raised her head from the crimson silk, leaning towards him against his hand, and mopping her eyes with the ghost of a handkerchief.

"It was the fur," she sobbed; "it felt so soft."

The explanation explained nothing to Terrington--a woman never seemed so unreasonable to him as when she gave her reasons--but its incomprehensibility absolved him from attempted consolation.

"Well," he smiled, "you mustn't cry again till you're across the border. Hukm hai!"

She looked up at him, leaning still against his hand.

"I'm afraid of your orders," she said shyly.

"Well, there's another," he went on with his paternal air; "you must wear everything warm you've got and pack only what you can put on later."

"I've nothing warm," she said with half a sob.

"Oh, come!" he rallied her; "then I'll have to send round the men who are padding your doolie to pad you too! How about that shooting suit of yours?"

His remembrance of it pleased her far more than her possession.

"It's not very warm," she murmured.

"Well, it's a good deal warmer than these flimsy things," he said, lifting the laces that lay round her neck; "and we'll turn a feather quilt into a petticoat for you, cut you a boa out of the mess-room bearskin, and put the poshteen on top of all. Mind, you'll have to parade in full marching order, or we'll leave you behind for Mir Khan to take care of."

An orderly entering with a chit at that moment made an end to the boyish talk that was meant to put fresh heart into her, and Terrington, after a glance at the scrap of paper, left her at once with a smile and a nod and an instant's tightening of his fingers upon her shoulder.

At sunset he read the sentences of the burial service over the trench beside the Residency in which the bodies of the three Englishmen were laid. The dusk was spreading under the autumn twilight, while the pale spaces of eternal snow beyond Rashát were veiled with rose in the clear heaven above the purple ramparts of the valley and the flames of the pyres on which the dead Hindus were burned blazed in clear spires of light through the increasing gloom.

Rose Chantry stood next to Terrington, in a shooting costume of golden-brown tweed, with a leather hunting-belt, a broad band of leather about the short skirt, brown leather boots that laced half way to the knee, and a brown tam-o'-shanter pinned tight upon her curls. She hardly knew what he was reading as she looked across the miles of evening to the tinted snows, and heard the crackle of the funeral fires on either side of her. Life had been suddenly changed altogether into something hard and glaring and stale and ugly like a ball-room opened to the dawn, and she felt to be growing hard and plain and matter of fact to match it.

The melancholy volleys were fired above the grave, the level flash of orange light splitting the darkness like the sweep of a sword, for Terrington, well aware that he was watched, would omit nothing which might by its absence suggest a desire for concealment. While the ostentation of the funeral was distracting the attention of Mir Khan's spies, all the outward openings in the walls were being closed, so that when the funeral party returned to the Fort the arrangements for immediate departure could be pushed forward with continued speed and in complete concealment. The twinkle of lanterns everywhere made the labyrinth of the old mud walls look as if invaded by a flight of fire-flies. In ordered lines across the courtyard the bearers squatted, brown and impassive, beside their burdens; line after line, hour after hour, filing forth from the dark doorways of the Fort, till half the space between its walls was full. The other half was covered with accoutrements and bristled with piled arms. In the stables the Lancers were removing every needless detail from their equipment, and a wisp of rag was twisted round any piece of metal from which a sound might be shaken. In the long gully between the stable and the Fort stood strings of mules with a few zabus, snorting and shuffling under the loads that were being heaped upon their backs.

An hour after midnight the gate of the courtyard was thrown open, and a dark stream of horsemen poured silently out and turned north-east towards the river. They had left their lances broken behind them, but took every ounce of food that they could carry and three hundred rounds a man. Hard on the dust of their hoofs followed the Sikhs and Bakót levies under Dore; the Sikhs, long and lithe, fine marchers and good fighters all of them; the Bakót men short and square, very doubtful shooters and untried in fight, but hard hill-men, at home in the snow, and equal to almost any labour. After them came the long lines of mules out of the gully snorting and shaking their packs and harness, and kicking up more dust than the horsemen. Rose Chantry's doolie followed in rear of these. It had been padded for her with quilts of Armak wool and lined with camel's hair curtains fastened down to keep out the wind, and carried a mattress of feathers, a span in depth, to save her from the joltings of the road. Terrington had literally sketched its construction with one hand while he wrote a despatch with the other, and had himself gone down to the yard to explain away the carpenter's difficulties. But he shook his head at the boxes in which Rose had packed what she considered "absolutely necessary."

"No good!" he said. "Even if we got them to the Palári, we'd have to leave them in the snow."

"How many bearers have I?" Rose demanded.

He looked down at her smiling.

"Four for the doolie and a mule for your baggage," he said; "about what's allowed for half a company. And there's a tent for you on the mule already."

"I can have some one else's tent," she exclaimed crossly.

"No one else _has_ a tent," he said with the same dry smile.

She turned from him petulantly.

"You can leave them all behind if you like; I don't care!"

Yet she repacked submissively--with the help of the khansamah, whom Terrington sent to the assistance of her pride--what she most needed in the space allowed her; with a new dull kindling of anger against the man who could compel her so easily to obey. But the eager preparations in the darkness subdued her with the sense of an impending fate, the silent streaming forth of the little force into the night towards the day of battle and the awful snows, and she was gratefully reassured when Terrington suddenly appeared beside her as the doolie drew up, and helped her in with a comforting pressure of the hand.

"Sleep if you can," he said; "we're perfectly safe for the next twelve hours."

His own beloved Guides brought up the rear, and he rode last with them out of the Fort.

For the next day and night danger only could threaten from direct pursuit, and so his place was for the present with the rear-guard.

VIII

The position in which Terrington found himself requires to be explained.

Determined to clear out of Sar, three ways lay before him. The valley of the Kotli to the south, through the Gate of the Great Evil, by which, with Sir Colvin Aire, he had come up from Sampur; the Darai Pass, due east across the Kalawari, and then south-east into the Punjab; and the Palári, north-east, through the wild welter of ranges under the roof of the world and over plains of snow to the western border of Cashmir.

The first, though physically far the easiest, was out of the question, since the road would be lined with hostile khels who could force him to fight every mile of the way, with the odds of the ground and numbers always against him.

The Darai, which came next in feasibility, was approached over an open and exposed country, and was commanded from above in its most dangerous defiles. Consequently it was by the Palári, the most arduous of all the roads between Sar and Hindustan, that Terrington determined to retire.

To Rashát, which Gale was holding at the foot of the Palári, there were two roads from Sar. One, the longer, which Terrington had taken, led up the left bank of the river through gorges of increasing grandeur till the Sorágh Gul was reached. There the shorter road from Sar joined it, and the two rose together to the snows. Terrington was forced to go the longer way because he could cover his retreat along it with a small rear-guard, and because the shorter passed through Sar itself and beside the very gates of the Palace; but he had to face the certainty of finding Mir Khan and his men at Sorágh Gul in a position almost impregnable barring his advance upon Rashát. There, if wedged between the force in front of him and that following him from Sar, he would be forced to starve or to surrender.

The six hundred men under him were too few to be used offensively; he could not squander them against odds in the open. If compelled to fight his way across the Sorágh Gul not many of that six hundred would find shelter in Rashát. By craft alone could he hope to reach the Palári with the foe behind him, and the craft that should deceive Mir Khan would have to be greatly daring. Greatly daring it was. He divided his force into three parts. The first, composed entirely of the Guides Cavalry Bengal Lancers, was to push on by forced marches to the further side of the double-headed valley which ended in the Sorágh Gul. Being mounted, on a fairly good road and with eight hours' start, it could reach this before the enemy, who was mostly on foot, could arrive by the shorter road through Bewal. Sending on a summons to Rashát for every man that could be spared, Walcot, who commanded the cavalry, had orders to wait the arrival of Mir Khan from Bewal, and then, making as much dust as possible, to retire slowly on Rashát, fighting as determined a rear-guard action as he could without exposing his men, in order to draw Mir Khan after him across the Gul. It was Terrington's hope that the Khan, seeing British troops beyond the Gul, would imagine that the entire force had reached it by a superhuman effort and, after a perfunctory search of the road towards Sar, would follow furiously in order to drive it headlong into Rashát.

To complete the deception, the central portion of Terrington's force, consisting of the Sikhs and Bakót levies in charge of the transport, were to remain concealed and not to approach the Gul till the Khan's intentions became apparent; and the Guides forming the rearguard had orders so to delay pursuit along the river road from Sar that the pursuers' fire should not reach Mir Khan's ears at the Gul for at least twelve hours after he had reached it.

Then if Mir Khan came to the lure, and followed Walcot, the Sikhs were to push on at full speed, seize the road where it crossed the Gul, and await the rush for safety of the enemy on finding that he was trapped.

It was a scheme of extreme audacity, but in its audacity lay its safety. In splitting up his little force Terrington seemed to be offering it for destruction in detail, but the offering was of such effrontery that no one, and Mir Khan least of all, was likely to be prepared for it. It afforded, so far as Terrington could see, his only chance of a blow decisive enough to cripple for the moment Mir Khan's power. If it failed of that the force was doomed. Yet, if it should fail, what else would have succeeded?

Though Terrington had urged Rose Chantry to rest while she could, the morning light was peering between the curtains of the doolie before sleep closed her eyes. She listened all night to the silent march: the grunts and whinny of the mules, the jangle of harness, the low-spoken orders of unseen men. And under it all the beat of feet in the dust, the quick clatter of driven hoofs, the dull even tramp of armed men.

When she woke it was high noon and her doolie was resting upon the ground. She pulled aside the curtain and looked out upon a land unknown to her. The doolie stood against a clump of tamarisk, but no other greenness met her eye in that valley of stones. The river bubbled somewhere beneath her out of sight; and, reaching to the sky, on either side of it stood astounding walls of rock, some sheer and broken into awful precipices, others vast shelving slopes of shale which gave an even more oppressive sense of distance and desolation than the cliffs themselves. A jagged ribbon of blue sky showed between them overhead, scarcely wider than the hidden bed of the river, and the sun blazed down into that cleft of air like the mouth of a furnace.

The heat fastened with a slap upon her hand as she stretched it out into the sunlight, and the whole valley seemed to bend and waver in the clear vapour that streamed from every stone. A little green tent was pitched beside the doolie under the tamarisk, but the only other sign of a camp came from the span, of mules being driven down to the water, and some fifty brown blankets stretched between rifles and pegged down with bayonets in the shade of which men were lying in every shape of dreamless sleep. They looked, even to her unpractised eye, terribly few in that wilderness of space.

As she crawled out of the doolie she discovered that there was a sentry posted over her and the tent, who presented arms, much to her embarrassment, as she scrambled up from her knees.

She could see no sign of her ayah, but in the tent she found her dressing-things laid out on a folding camp-table; there was a canvas basin on a trestle, which was also none of hers, and a canvas bath on the floor.

She questioned the sentry in her broken mixture of tongues about the ayah, but he could tell her nothing, and evidently had not seen a woman about the place.

So, very shyly, and after cautious tying of the tent-flap, testing of its skirts, and closing of its little grated window, she began her first toilet in camp, pausing, poised, to listen to every strange sound without, and especially between every splash of the water in her bath.

She was coiling her hair about her head before the tiny mirror in one dense twist, which displayed better than any fashionable device its golden thickness, when she heard the slap of the sentry's hand on the stock of his rifle, and Terrington's voice outside the tent.

"Hope you slept," it rang out cheerily. "Gholam is getting us something to eat as soon as you're ready."

Rose Chantry's head came through the flap of the tent, with a white arm and elbow moulding the last roll of her hair.

"Where's my ayah?" she asked plaintively.

"I wish I knew," said Terrington, handing over his horse to a sais and lifting his helmet. "When we started last night she wasn't to be found. You'll have to put up, I'm afraid, with Gholam's valeting."