Far to Seek Part 27

The depressingly bare, whitewashed bedroom owned a French bedstead, with bra.s.s rails;--a welcome 'find' in a dak bungalow, especially after three very broken nights in an Indian train. Tired to the point of stupefaction, Roy promised himself he would sleep the clock round; eat a three-decker Anglo-Indian breakfast, and thereafter be his own man again. In that faith he laid his head on the least lumpy portion of the pillow--and in less than five minutes found himself quite intolerably wide awake.

Though the bedstead neither repudiated him, nor took liberties with his person, ghostly clankings and vibrations still jarred his nerves and played devil's tunes in his brain. Though he kept his eyelids severely closed, sleep--the coveted anodyne--seemed to hover on the misty edge of things, always just out of reach. His body was over-tired, his brain abnormally alert. Each change of position, that was to be positively the last, lost its virtue in the s.p.a.ce of three minutes, till the sheet--that was too narrow for the mattress--became ruckled into hills and valleys and made things worse than ever. Having started like this, he knew himself capable of keeping it up gaily till the small hours; and to-night, of all nights----!

Even through his closed eyelids, he was still aware that his verandah doorway framed a wide panel of moonlight--the almost incredible moonlight of India. He had flung it open as usual and rolled up the chick. A bedroom hermetically sealed made him feel suffocated, imprisoned; so he must, perforce, put up with the moon; and when the world was drowned in her radiance, sleep seemed almost a sin. But to-night, moon or no, he craved sleep as an opium-eater craves his magic pellets,--because he wanted to dream. It was many weeks since he last had sight of his mother. But surely she must be near him in his loneliness; aware, in some mysterious fashion, of the deep longing with which he longed for sight or sense of her, to a.s.sure him that--in spite of qualms and indecisions--he had chosen aright. Conviction grew that directly the veil of sleep fell he would see her. It magnified his insomnia from mere discomfort to a baffling inimical presence withholding him from her:--till utter weariness blotted out everything; and even as he hovered on the verge of sleep, she was there....

She was lying in her hammock under the beeches, in her apple-blossom sari, sunlight flickering through the leaves. And he saw his own figure moving towards her, without the least surprise, that he could see and hear himself as another being, while still remaining inside himself.

He heard his own voice say, low and fervently, "Beloved little Mother--I am here. Always in the battle I remembered Chitor. Now--turned out of the battle--I have come to Chitor."

Then he was on his knees beside her; and her fingers, light as thistledown, strayed over his hair, in the ghost of a caress that so unfailingly stilled his excitable spirit. Without actual words, by some miracle of interpenetration, she seemed to know all that was in his heart--the perplexities and indecisions; the magnetism of Home and the dread of it; the difficulty of making things clear to his father. And the magic of her touch charmed away all inner confusions, all headache and heartache. But when he rose impulsively, and would have taken her in his arms--she was gone; everything was gone; ... the hammock, the beeches, the sunbeams....

He was standing alone on a moonlit plain, blotched and streaked with shadows of dak-jungle and date-palm; and rising out of it abruptly--as he had seen it last night--loomed the black bulk of Chitor; the sacred, solitary ghost of a city, linked with his happiest days of childhood and his mother's heroic tales. The great rock was scarped and bastioned, every line of it. The walls, ruined in parts, showed ghostly shades of ruins beyond; and soaring high above all, Khumba Rana's nine-storied Tower of Victory lifted a giant finger to the unheeding heavens.

Watching it, fascinated, trying in vain to make out details, he was startlingly beset by the strangest among many strange sensations that had visited his imaginative brain: nothing less than a revival of the long-ago dream-feeling, the strange sense of familiarity--he knew!

Beyond all cavil, he knew every line of that looming shadow, every curve of the hills. He knew the exact position of the old bridge over the Gamberi river. From the spot where he stood, he could find his way unerringly to the Padal Pol--the fortified entrance to the road of Seven Gates;--the road that had witnessed, three times in three hundred years, that heroic alternative to surrender, the terrible rite of Johur:--the final down-rush of every male defender, wearing the saffron robe and coronet of him who embraces death as a bride; the awful slaughter at the lowest gate, where they fell, every man of them, before the victors entered in....

The horror and savage exaltation of it all stirred, so sensibly, in his veins that he caught himself dimly wondering--was it he, Roy Sinclair, who stood there remembering these things--or another...?

And before that crazy question could resolve itself--behold he was lying wide awake again in his ruckled bed, on the lumpy pillow, staring at the wide patch of moonlight framed by his open door.

Not morning _yet_, confound it all! But the tiredness and loneliness were clean gone. It was always so when she came to him thus. Tacitly, he knew it, and she knew it, for a visitation. There was no delusion of having got her back again; only the comforting a.s.surance that she was near him still. There was also, on this occasion, a consuming curiosity and impatience not to be denied.

Switching on his electric torch, he consulted his watch. Nearly half-past four--why not ...? It was no distance to the lower gate, and only a mile of zigzag road up to the city.

Thought and action were almost simultaneous. He was out of bed, standing in the doorway. The moon's unclouded brilliance seemed to flood his brain; to clear it of cobwebs and dispel all desire of sleep. For he loved the veiled spirit of night as most men love the unveiled face of morning; and in no way, perhaps, was he more clearly of the East. In a land where the sun slays his thousands, the moon comes triumphantly to her own: and Roy decided, there and then, that in the glamour of her light he would take his first look at Chitor. Whether or no it really was his first look, he might possibly find out when he got there.

His train-basket provided him with a hurried cup of tea, biscuits and a providential hard-boiled egg. He had no qualms about rousing Bishun Singh to saddle Suraj, or disturbing the soldiery quartered at the gates. His grandfather had written of him to the Maharana of Udaipur--a cousin in the third degree: and he had leave to go in and out, during his stay, at what hour he pleased. He would remain on the rock till dawn; and from the ninth storey of Khumba Rana's Tower he would see the sun rise over Chitor....

Half an hour later, he was in the saddle trotting along the empty road; Terry, a scurrying shadow in his wake; Bishun Singh left to finish his night's rest. Eight before him loomed the magnet that had dragged him out of bed at this unearthly hour--the great rock-fortress, three miles long, less than a mile broad, aptly likened to a battleship ploughing through the disturbed sea of bush-grown hills at its base.

Riding quickly through new Chitor--a dirty little town, fast asleep--he reached the fortified gateway: was challenged by sleepy soldiery; gave his name and pa.s.sed on--into another world; a world that grew increasingly familiar with every hundred yards of ascent.

At one point he halted abreast of two rough monuments, graves of the valiant pair who had fought and died, like Rajputs, in that last terrible onslaught when the hosts of Akbar entered in, over the bodies of eight thousand saffron-robed warriors, and made Chitor a place of desolation for ever. One--a mere boy of sixteen--was the only son of his house. Beside him, lance in hand, fought his widowed mother and girl wife; and in death they were not divided. The other, Jaimul of Bednore, was a far-away ancestor of his own mother. How often she had told him the tale--adding proudly that, while Rajasthan endured, the names of those two would shine clear in the firmament of time, as stars in the firmament of s.p.a.ce.

Through gateway after gateway--under the lee of a twenty-foot wall, pierced for musketry,--he pa.s.sed, a silent shadow. And gradually there stole over him afresh the confused wonder of his dream,--was it he himself who rode--or was it--that other, returning to the sacred city after long absence? For the moment he could hardly tell. But--what matter? The astonishing thrill of recognition was all....

Round about the seventh gateway cl.u.s.tered the semblance of a village; shrouded, slumbering forms strewn around in the open;--ghosts all. The only instant realities were himself and Suraj and Chitor, and the silence of the sleeping earth, watched over by unsleeping stars. Within, and about him, hovered a stirring consciousness of ancient, unchanging India; utterly impervious to mere birds of pa.s.sage from the West; veiled, elusive, yet almost hideously real. So real, just then, to Roy, that--for a few amazing moments--he was unaware that he rode through a city forsaken by man. Ghosts of houses and temples slid by on either side of him, as he spurred Suraj to a canter and made unerringly for the main palace. There was news for the Rana--news of Akbar's army--that did not brook delay....

Not till Suraj stopped dead--there where the Palace had once stood in its glory--did he come to himself, as abruptly as when he waked in the French bedstead an hour ago.

Gone was the populous city through which he had ridden in fancy; gone the confusion of himself with that other self--how many centuries old?

But the familiar look of the palace was no dream; nor the fact that he had instinctively made his way there at full speed. Bastioned and sharply domed, it stood before him in clear outline; but within sides it was hollow as a skull; a place of ghosts. Suddenly there came over him the old childish dread of dark, that he had never quite outgrown. But dread or no, explore it he must....

As his foot touched earth, a low hiss warned him he was trespa.s.sing, and clutching Terry's collar, he stood rigid, while the whip-like shadow of death writhed across a strip of moonlight--and disappeared. There was life,--of a sort, in Chitor. So Roy trod warily as he pa.s.sed from room to room; dread of dark forgotten in the weird fascination of foreknowledge verified without fail.

Through riven walls and roofs, moonlight streamed: its spectral brightness intensifying every patch or streak of shadow. And there, where Kings and Princes had held audience--watched by their womenfolk through fretted screens--was neither roof nor walls; only a group of marble pillars, as it were a.s.sembled in ghostly conference. The stark silence and emptiness--not of yesterday, but of centuries--smote him with a personal pang. From end to end of the rock it brooded; a haunting presence,--tutelary G.o.ddess of Chitor. There is an emptiness of the open desert, of an untrodden snowfield that lifts the soul and sets it face to face with G.o.d; but the emptiness of a city forsaken is that of a body with the spark of life extinct:--'the silver cord loosed, the golden bowl broken, and the pitcher broken at the fountain ...'

Terry's sharp bark, a squawk and a scuffle of wings, made him start violently and jarred him all through. It seemed almost profane--as if one were in a cathedral. Calling the marauder to heel, he mounted and rode on toward the Tower of Victory. For the moon was dipping westward; and he must see that vast view bathed in moonlight. Then the dawn....

Once more deserting Suraj; he confronted Khumba's Tower; scatheless as the builder's hand left it four centuries ago. Ma.s.sive and arrogant, it loomed above him; scarcely a foot of stone uncarven, so far as he could see--exploring the four-square base of it with the aid of the moon and his torch. Figures, in high relief, everywhere--animal, human and divine; a riot of impossible forms, impossibly intertwined; ghoulish in any aspect, and in moonlight hideously so:--bewildering, repellent, frankly obscene. But even while his cultured eye rejected it all, some infinitesimal fragment of himself knew there was symbolic meaning in that orgy of sculpture, could one but find the key.

Up and up, round and round the inner spiral staircase he climbed, in a creepsome darkness, invaded by moonbeams, hardly less creepsome, admitted through window-like openings set in every face of every storey.

With each inrush of light, each flash of his torch, in deepest darkness, those thronging figures, weirdly distorted, sprang at him afresh, sending ignominious trickles down his spine. Walls, window slabs, door beams--the vast building was encrusted with them from base to summit; a nightmare of prancing, writhing, gesticulating unrest; only one still face repeated at intervals--the Great G.o.d holding the wheel of Law....

Never had Roy more keenly appreciated the company of Terry, who, in spite of a Celtic pedigree, was not enjoying this prolonged practical joke.

It was relief unspeakable to emerge at last, into full light and clean sweet morning air. For the ninth storey, under the dome, was arcaded on all four sides and refreshingly innocent of decoration. Not a posturing figure to be seen. Nothing but restful slabs of polished stone. There was meaning in this also--could one catch the trend of the builder's thought.

On a slab near an arcaded opening Roy sat gratefully down; while Terry, bored to extinction with the whole affair, curled himself up in a shadowed corner and went fast asleep. "Unfriendly little beast," thought Roy; and promptly forgot his existence.

For below him, in the silvery moonlight of morning, lay Chitor; her shattered arches and battlements, her temples and palaces dwarfed to mere footstools for the G.o.ds. And beyond, and again beyond, lay the naked strength and desolation of northern Rajputana--white with poppy-fields, velvet-dark with scrub, jagged with outcrops of volcanic rock; the gaunt warrior country, battered by centuries of struggle and slaughter; making calamity a whetstone for courage; saying, in effect, to friend and enemy, 'Take me or leave me. You cannot change me.'

The Border had fascinated Roy. The Himalayas had subjugated him. But this strong unlovely region of rock and sand, of horses and swords, of chivalry and cruelty and daring, irresistibly laid siege to his heart; gave him the authentic sense of being one with it all.

On a day, in that summer of blessed memory, his mother had almost promised him that, once again she would revisit India if only for the joy of making a pilgrimage with him to Chitor. And here he sat on the summit of Khumba Rana's Tower--alone. That was the way of life....

Gradually there stole over him a great weariness of body and spirit; pure reaction from the uplift of his strange adventure. His lids drooped heavily. In another moment he would have fallen sound asleep; but he saved himself, just in time. When he craved the thing, it eluded him; now, undesired, it a.s.sailed him. But it would never do. He might sleep for hours. And at the back of his mind lurked a clear conviction that he was waiting for more than the dawn....

To shake off drowsiness he rose, stretched himself, paced to and fro several times--and did not sit down again. Folding his arms, he leaned his shoulders against the stone embrasure; and stood so, a long while, absorbing--with every faculty of flesh and spirit--the stillness, the mystery, the pearl-grey light and bottomless gulfs of shadow; his mind emptied of articulate thought ... his soul poised motionless, as it were a bird on outspread wings....

Was it fantasy, this gradual intensifying of his uplifted mood, this breathless stir in the region of his heart, till some vital part of him seemed gradually withdrawn--up into the vastness and the silence...?

And suddenly, in every nerve, he knew--he was not alone. In the seeming emptiness of the place, something, some one hovered near him. Amazed, yet exultant, he held his breath; and an answering leap of the heart set him tingling from head to foot.

It was more than a vague 'sense of presence.' Fused in the central happiness that flooded him--as the moonlight flooded the desert--was an almost startling awareness; not the mere emotional effect of music or a poem; but sure knowledge that she was there with him in that upper room; her disembodied tenderness yearning towards him across a barrier of empty s.p.a.ce that neither she nor he could traverse, for all their nearness, for all their longing....

If Lance himself had come audibly up those endless stairs and stood beside him, he could not have felt more certain of his presence than he felt, at this moment, of her companionship, her unspoken a.s.surance that he _had_ chosen aright. He felt himself, if possible, the less real of the two.

For that brief s.p.a.ce, his world seemed empty of everything, every one, but they two--so irrevocably sundered, so mysteriously united.

Could he only have sight of her to complete the marvel of it! But although he kept his eyes on the spot whence the 'feel of her' seemed to come, not the shadow of a shade could he see; only--was it fancy?--a hint of brighter radiance than mere moonbeams--there, near the opposite archway?

He dared not move a finger lest he break the spell. Yet he could not restrain altogether the emotion that surged in him, that filled his ears with a soft roar as of breaking waves.

"G.o.d bless you, little Mother!" he murmured, barely above his breath--and waited; expecting he knew not what.

A ghost of a breeze pa.s.sed close to him;--truly a ghost, for the night was dead still. Almost he could have sworn that if he put out a hand he would have touched her. But reverence withheld him, rather than fear.

And the next moment, the place was empty. He was alone....

He felt the emptiness as unmistakably as he had felt her presence. But the pang of her going was shot through with elation that at last his waking brain had knowledge of her--a knowledge that no man could wrest from him, even if she never so came again. He had done her bidding. He had kept his manhood pure and the windows of his soul clear--and, behold, the Light _had_ shone through....

Impossible to tell how long he stood there. In those few moments of intensified life, time was not. The ordinary sense of his surroundings faded. The inner sense of reality quickened in like measure; the reality of her presence, all the more felt, because it was unseen....

When he came clearly to himself again, the moon had vanished. Eastward, the sky was full of primrose light. It deepened and blazed; till, all in a moment, the sun leaped from the scabbard of the hills, keen and radiant as a drawn sword.