Part 5

He offered her the idea lightly, as though it were all part of a picnic; but he had ridden through the night, after the ayah's flight had been discovered, tortured by the thought of the woman, sleeping in the litter in front of him, young, lovely, widowed and alone among six hundred men, without a single other of her sex to shield her from the coarseness and defilement of war.

He well knew how men, pressed by the necessities of the field and simplified by the daily presence of death, reverted to a savage shamelessness, a sweeping aside of convention, not at all to their discredit, but of a very fearful grossness to a woman's eyes: and he felt, contemplating the future of the next few days, almost as if he were the accomplice of some iniquitous abduction.

Rose Chantry noticed--she was learning to notice--that Terrington had not been out of the saddle since he left Sar. A smoke of dust fell from the wrinkles of his tunic and breeches as he slid to the ground, and there were tiny furrows of dust upon his face. She noticed too--but that needed no learning--how the searching hard-browed look of the scout went suddenly out of his eyes as they fell upon her, and the lines about his lips relaxed. He had ridden forward to the hanging bridge where alone the river could be crossed below the Gul, as Walcot had sent back word that it would require strengthening to carry the transport, and he was of necessity his own engineer. So he had missed the sleep and meal of which his men had partaken, and had some reason to look way-worn when he appeared before Rose Chantry's tent after thirty hours of unceasing strain.

Yet when he reappeared, washed and shaven, fifteen minutes later, he seemed as alert as though he had but just left his bed. Responsibility always endued him with double strength.

Gholam Muhammed could discover nothing better than a broken biscuit-case to set the breakfast on, so Rose brought out the camp table from her tent and improvised a tablecloth from a Russian towel.

Terrington, returning to find her seated in the shade of the tamarisk making tea, looking, thanks to the close coils about her head, more astoundingly young than ever, blithe and fresh as an English morning, caught his breath with a sharper sense of her isolation.

He seated himself on the biscuit-case at the further side of the table, and his glance travelled from her up the forbidding precipices, and back again to her trim figure.

"Well!" she enquired provokingly; "you're wishing me a thousand miles away?"

"I am," he nodded.

"You're not half grateful for your mercies," she retorted; "it ought to be rather a change to have a woman to pour out tea for you before a battle!"

"Oh, it is a change," he smiled.

She handed him a mug of blue and white enamel.

"And is there going to be a battle?"

"Not to-day," he said.

"To-morrow?"

"Probably."

"And shall we all be killed?"

"It's not impossible," he said gravely.

She leant her lips down to her own brimming mug and looked across at him over its edge.

"Don't you wish you were safe back in Sar?" she said.

He shook his head as she lifted and drained the mug and set it down with a sigh of content.

"I _was_ so thirsty. Isn't it grilling? Why did you make me wear these clothes? I can't see much sign of the snows. Isn't this tinned milk horrid? What's become of all the men? You don't seem to have kept many to look after me! Will you have an egg?"

"Please," said Terrington to her last question.

"Was that your bath and basin I had this morning?" she went on.

"It was," he said.

"I don't see why I should be clean at your cost," she demurred.

"Oh, you're not," he assured her; "you're the only one in the force with time to be clean at all, and even you won't want to wash after to-morrow."

"We shall all be killed, shan't we?" she asked mischievously.

"Whether or not," he said drily; "we shall be too cold to have much use for water."

"I can't imagine such a condition just now," she answered.

"You'll be able to when you've crossed the Palári," said Terrington quietly.

She twisted her chair sideways, put one hand above the other across the back of it, and leant her chin upon them both. She watched Terrington so for a few seconds while he finished his egg. Then she asked:

"What have you done with Captain Walcot?"

"He's commanding the advance-guard."

"Miles and miles away?"

"I hope so by now," he said.

"Is _he_ going to fight to-day?"

"No."

"To-morrow? When we all do?"

"Mir Khan permitting," said Terrington with a smile.

"Will it be more dangerous where he is than where we shall be?"

"No," said Terrington; "rather safer. He'll have a line of retreat."

"Safer!" she echoed with astonishment; "then why didn't you send me with him?"

Terrington looked at her thoughtfully as he inverted the tin of milk above his mug.

"Pure selfishness," he said. "I wanted some one to pour out tea for me before the battles."

"I don't see why you shouldn't speak the truth," she pouted.

"I don't see why you should want it spoken if you know it so well," he said.

"You were afraid to send me with him!" she thrust out sharply.

"Was I?" he said, cutting off the drip of the milk with his spoon.

"Yes! You were afraid he'd spend his time with me instead of looking after his men."

Terrington pushed the kedgeri towards her persuasively, but she shook her head.

"Do you know that Captain Walcot is in love with me?" she went on.

"How should I?" he said, helping himself to the dish she had declined.

She gave a little hopeless sigh at his obtuseness and a complacent tilt of the head.

"He's been in love with me ever since he came to Sar," she asserted.

"Has he?" said Terrington, puzzled by the confidence.

"Yes," she nodded. "You think that very wrong, I suppose?"

"Well," he admitted mildly, "do you think it very right yourself."

She straightened her shoulders, lifting her chin, and her grip tightened on the back of the chair.

"It's not a question of what I do or don't think right," she said with sudden fierceness; "it's a question of what a woman's got to be and to put up with out here if she's tolerably good looking. You think we're just silly fools, who laugh and chatter and let men make love to us. You don't know that it's just to keep things pleasant, and prevent rows for one's husband in little places like Sar, where every one's jumbled together, that one does laugh, and chatter, and pretend not to see things, and seem to like things that one hates. You suppose, because we don't make a fuss, that we're frivolous and empty-headed, and don't think for a moment what a time you'd have of it if we went in for being anything else."

"No," said Terrington doubtfully; "I don't suppose we do."

He was perplexed by her revelation, never imagining that it came of a desire for his good opinion, and resenting her careless sacrifice of another man's secret. He knew nothing about women, nor how little they counted a loss of honour from the sacrifice of anything in what could be considered an excusing cause.

So that he was quite unprepared when, with her elbow propped upon the chair, and turning her back upon his vague admission, she said in a voice uncontrollably unsteady.

"Oh, I know what you think of me!"

Terrington, who neither knew what he thought of her nor what she thought he thought of her, held his tongue, and Rose, with her back still towards him, and after a sniff at the opposite hills, continued less precariously:

"Do you think it's impossible for a woman to change?"

"Oh, surely," he protested, smiling; "that's never been urged against her."

"You might be serious when you know I am," she said with such a grieved reproach that Terrington repented his levity. "Mayn't a woman learn something sometimes from things that happen, even though she was once a fool?"

"Yes, I'm sure she may," he assented heartily; "and much quicker than a man."

She turned about towards him gratefully.

"Yes," she sighed, "but you'll never believe that I shall be good for anything, after what I did in Sar?"

"Oh, shan't I!" he said cheerily. He finished his tea, and smiled at her with a new friendliness across the table. "Look here," he said, "I'm going to turn in, and I want you to wake me in an hour's time. Will you?"

She nodded.

"But you want more than an hour."

"Yes," he said, "but I'm not going to get it." He looked at his wrist. "That'll be on the stroke of three. You've got a watch?"

She held hers to her ear.

"It's stopped," she said.

He unfastened his from his wrist and handed it to her.

"Wouldn't you like a sleep yourself," he suggested.

"Oh, no!" she said.

He threw himself down in the shade of the tamarisk, and, leaning on his elbow, glanced at her for a moment doubtfully.

"It's only to be an hour," he reminded her; "not what you think I want."

"You're going to be called at three," she said precisely.

He smiled at her little air of responsibility as he laid his head down upon his arm, and she, seeing that he had nothing on which to rest it, got up quickly and fetched him a pillow from her doolie.

"Why didn't you ask me for it," she said reproachfully.

He took it from her with another smile.

"I'm so unused to the luxury of being looked after by a lady."

But he gave her hand a clasp which meant a good deal more to it than gratitude.

Rose Chantry sat almost motionless during the hour which followed, in that happy sort of preoccupation which is outside of time. She had strapped on Terrington's watch, to feel the loose shackle of it about her thin wrist, and looked now and again at its face with startled consciousness, unaware if minutes or hours had gone by since her last inspection.

The valley lay oppressively silent in the fierce heat. The mirage had eaten up its northern end, and the close-set precipices had melted into an open space of air, which showed, with the strangest effect of disappearance, nothing beyond.

Thin blue threads of smoke stretched up to heaven from the forsaken camp fires, and the mules which had come back from watering floundered in the dust; but nothing else seemed to move between those walls of stone except the ceaseless waver of the heated air.

Terrington slept without stirring; his lips set as firmly as when he was awake, his lids closed like a mask in bronze, as if rather with determination than from drowsiness.

Rose could not help comparing the strong guarded look of his sleeping face with the flaccid abandonment of Lewis Chantry's, who always slumbered with his mouth open and his eyelids half apart.

At three she leant over and put her finger upon his arm, and his eyes opened quiet and wide awake as though she had touched the spring of his consciousness.

He rose at once, whistled for his horse, was in the saddle three minutes later, and riding, a solitary figure, up the gray road of the stony valley towards the bridge.

Rose Chantry watched till the undulating outlines of both horse and rider were dissolved in the distorting glare, with a feeling in her heart which no man before had ever brought there.

IX

An hour later Terrington returned, and the march recommenced. The bridge had been strengthened, but even so it looked perilous enough, and Rose, after seeing one of the mules lurch over and burst to a pulp on the rocks beneath, preferred to walk across with a rope about her than to be carried in the doolie.

Afterwards she fell asleep and was only wakened when Terrington drew aside the curtain and told her that it was time for dinner. The doolie was on the ground again, but the night was black about it and a cold air seemed to be pouring down out of the sky.

Rose shivered as she pushed the curtains aside and stepped out into the darkness. Spaces of pitchy gloom on either side of her, and a sparkling riband of stars overhead showed the force to be still in the defile, but something ghostlike and pale seemed to come between the stony blackness and the stars. It was the light of the snows.

A few yards beyond the doolie a fire flickered, over which Gholam was leaning, peering into a pot; and further off some score of camp-fires pierced the darkness with clear pointed cones of flame.

As she came into the circle of the firelight Terrington appeared beside her, the poshteen in his hand.

"Sleep well?" he asked as he helped her arms into it, and turning her round towards him by the collar, buttoned the frogs across her chest as though she were a child.

"It fits you proper!" he proclaimed, surveying her at arm's length.

She smiled at his motherly vigilance, but felt with keen happiness its protective care. He made her feel so completely in his charge that, had he given her a kiss as he buttoned her coat, it would have seemed no more than she had been accustomed to from others who had dressed her.

He drew a stool for her to the fire, recounted the humorous mischances of the journey while she had been asleep, and jested over the ingredients in the stew which Gholam was making them.

The frank fraternity in his manner increased her sense of a girlhood which had come back to her. She sat listening to his talk with the smiling happy-serious air of youth. And they ate together of the stew with great relish despite the suggestions he proposed to find in its bones. And when they had finished the modest little dinner, Terrington spread a rug beside the fire, and they sat close to the red verge of it, for comfort of the warmth; Rose, resting on her wrist, with her feet tucked under her, girlishly erect, and with the big collar of the poshteen turned up about her ears, but Terrington, at greater ease, leaning upon his elbow with his body bent towards the flames.

Rose, however, did not have him altogether to herself. The approach of action was signalled by a succession of orderlies, for whom brief notes had to be written, and Hussain Shah arrived later for a consultation.

Still, despite its interruptions the time seemed to her the most delightful she had ever spent. She was tasting for the first time what it meant to feel.

The blazing fire pushed the night back from a brief circle about them, and, when the flame fell, the darkness seemed to leap forward like a black thing with wings trying to spring from behind upon their shoulders.

In the darkness was the unknown morrow, and death, and the blood and horror of battle; and in the firelight just the man and herself; the man who was showing her a new unknown kind of manliness, and herself with all her married days and ways forgot, listening like a girl to her first discovery in heroes.

"Time to turn in," said Terrington, as he came back out of the darkness on parting from Hussain. "We start at two; and no one can say when we sleep again, so do all you know. I'll see if your doolie is ready."

She turned out one little hand to the flame with a shiver.

"Oh, I can't leave the fire," she said. "Mayn't I sleep here?"

He looked at her with the air of considering her request as a reasonable proposition.

"I don't see why you shouldn't," he said; "I'll fetch your blankets."

He fetched the mattress as well, and the boots he had given her, which he happened to find inside the doolie.

"You must wear these," he said, "if you sleep out."

She took them from him with a sigh of submission, sat down upon the mattress and prepared to pull them on.

"Don't put your hand into them," he said warningly.

She opened her eyes in question.

"It may make you cry," he smiled.

She repaid his memory with a glance of pleased surprise, and shook her head softly.

"Not now!" she said.

She held up the boot towards him, and thrust her arm down into its depths.

"So warm," she purred.

She covered her shyness in pulling them on before him with the pretence that they were much too tight.

Terrington smiled at her efforts.

"I'm afraid you'll grow out of them very soon," he said.

Then he tucked her in under the blankets and wrapping himself in his cloak lay down beside her. She risked the comfort in which he had arranged her to stretch out a small white hand to him to say good-night; and he held it long enough to express to her the subtle newness and nearness in their common knowledge that such a night might mean.

Rose seemed only to have just ceased to watch the changing colour of the flame on Terrington's face when a hand was laid on her shoulder and his voice spoke in her ear. She jumped up, dreaming of battles, so stiff that she would have fallen but for the arm which he put under hers. The doolie suddenly appeared out of the darkness, he helped her in, bade her good-bye with a clasp of the hand, dropped a sharp order to the sentry who strode beside her, and was gone. The bearers moved off at a quick amble, and when they halted she knew she was amongst men. The night was still of an impenetrable black and she could see nothing between her curtains, but she heard in the silence the shuffle of feet, and the grunted "Huh!" of the Bakót men as they fell in half awake and hitched up their accoutrements.

Then with a whisper the jampanis moved on, and to the swinging to and fro of the doolie she fell asleep.

X

Rose woke to a sense of excitement which pierced her sleep.

"Tell him they're right down here in front of us," she heard Dore's voice in a hard whisper. "And take that doolie back," he added angrily.

The doolie spun round, but before it was gone a hundred yards Rose stopped the bearers.

The morning was gray, cold, and very still, just after dawn. A white wet mist had come down upon the hills, and hung from cliff to cliff like a ceiling cloth across the valley. Ahead, laid out behind boulders of blue grey stone, she could see the yellowish attenuated line of Dore's Sikhs spread like a fan on either side of the road.

A runner, naked but for his loin-cloth, and throwing up the dust from the soles of his feet, went by towards the front, coming back somewhat less hurriedly ten minutes later.

There was no further sound nor sign of life for half an hour, and then Terrington with an orderly came in view round the bend of the road riding slowly. He stopped with a smile of wonder where Rose was sitting on a stone before her doolie at the side of the road.

"However did you get here?" he asked.

"Mr. Dore sent me back," she pouted.

"Sent you _back_!" he echoed. "I should think he did."

She came up to his horse's shoulder, and with a "Good morning," offered him her hand.

"Is it going to be a fight?" she asked as he took it.

"It is," he answered, "and you're in front of the firing line. You must wait here till I return to you."

She stood back demurely with her hands behind her, and he rode on with some injunction to her sentry which she did not understand.

He was met, she saw, by Dore near the line of skirmishers, and in obedience to some command the section on either side of the road turned outwards and began to creep up the steep sides of the valley, taking cover, when they halted, so effectively that not a man was to be seen.

Just as the last of them had disappeared a rifle rang out, faintly, far ahead.

Rose, who had not taken her eyes from Terrington, stiffened at the sound, and stood tensely listening with an ear towards it.

She had to wait a full five minutes till the shot was repeated, but hard upon that followed the soft rattle of a fusillade. Though it sounded vague and dull as the patter of rain on water, she knew it at once for what it was, and started forward eagerly towards it along the road.

The sentry, mindful of Terrington's injunction, tried to stop her, but she ordered him to stand aside with such imperious authority that he gave way, and Rose went on towards the spot where Terrington was posted above the road with his glasses raised. He was so absorbed in the scene they gave him that he did not hear Mrs. Chantry's approach, and was only aware of her presence beside him when he turned to search for the Sikhs upon the hill.

He lowered his glasses sharply and faced her with a frown.

"I told you to wait for me," he said reprovingly.

"I know," she murmured, "but I couldn't. I'm no good at waiting." Then, as this information brought no softening to his eyes, she added defiantly: "I don't see why you should treat me as a child. I don't intend to be kept out of danger."

"There's no danger here to keep you out of," said Terrington, "except the danger of your being seen." His eyes took in her troubled face and his manner changed suddenly to a reasoning gentleness. "You see the fight's right away over there, beyond the Gul. Mir Khan's pushing Walcot back on Rashát, and we hope he thinks he's got us all. We're hiding here, in case he sends any one to look for us along the road to Sar, and the game would be up if he spotted us."

He helped her up on to a stone which gave her a view over the low ridge in front of them, and handed her his glasses. Then, as she did not know how to use them, he turned her round to him, and fitted them to her eyes, and standing behind her with his hands over her shoulders, shifted the lens till they suited her sight.

The mists had lifted, and she could see without assistance the entrance to the double-headed valley where the gorge which brought the road from Bewal joined that from Sar. Beyond their junction was the famous Gul, showing as a dark cleft across the valley, and, again beyond that the hills closed in about a defile more forbidding than that through which they had come.

Here and there across the throat of it, like tufts of bog cotton, burst little white puffs of smoke, where Walcot's men were holding back Mir Khan's reconnaissance. The force they covered was so well concealed that even the glass revealed no sign of it, but the Khan's advance could be traced in specks and streaks of whitish yellow climbing out of the Gul, which Walcot had made but a feint of defending, and creeping dispersedly towards the puffs of smoke.

Down the valley towards Bewal the Khan's main body could be made out. Dark masses of men divided by varying spaces and mingling in the distance with driven flocks and herds. The dull morning glimmer of steel wavered over it like the light upon a spider's web.

Near the centre was a body of horsemen tailing out along the road, which made a gay tendril of colour even at that leaden hour, it was the Khan's bodyguard in purple and fawn and gold.

As Rose Chantry moved the glasses from end to end of the enemy's column, her certainty of a safe return to India collapsed utterly.

She looked round at Terrington, expecting to see the same despair on his face that had seized upon her heart, but he was watching Mir Khan's advance with an unaltered countenance.

"Oh, Captain Terrington!" she cried hopelessly, "there are thousands of them: they'll eat us up."

He put a hand under each of her elbows and lifted her down from the stone.

"Well!" he said smiling, "we're going to play the dickens with their digestion."

They walked down to the road where Dore was standing with Terrington's mare.

"You need send back word of nothing," said Terrington, "we overlook your position. Keep your men where they are, no matter what force may pass you, and don't fire a shot till you get the signal."

This laying of a line of fire across the neck of the defile had been Terrington's last piece of daring, to cover the chance of Mir Khan's detaching a force to search the Sar road strong enough to pen the British troops in the defile and prevent their issuing to fall upon the flank of the men engaging Walcot beyond the Gul.

Terrington realized the possibility of such a move on seeing the size of the force which the Khan had so unexpectedly collected, and added at once this risk the more to the many he was taking in order to make the enemy's defeat sufficiently disastrous to deter him for a few hours from pursuit.

He nodded a farewell to Dore, lifted Rose into the saddle, and walked back beside her.

She leant forward to pat the mare's neck and get a side view of his face.