Rosa Mundi and Other Stories Part 69

Dead silence fell in the darkened tent--the silence of the desert, subtle, intense, in a fashion terrible. It lasted for a long time; so long a time that Herne suffered himself at last to relax, feeling the strain to be more than he could bear. He leaned among his pillows, and waited. Yet still, persistently, he grasped that cold, sinuous hand, though the very touch of it repelled him, as the touch of a reptile provokes instinctive loathing. It lay quite pa.s.sive in his own, a thing inanimate, yet horribly possessed of life.

Slowly at last through the darkness a voice came:

"Monty!"

It was hardly more than a whisper; yet on the instant, as if by magic, all Herne's repulsion, his involuntary, irrepressible shrinking, was gone. He was back once more on the other side of the gulf, and the hand he held was the hand of a friend.

"My dear old chap!" he said very gently.

Vaguely he discerned the figure by his side. It sat huddled, mummy-like but it held no horrors for him any longer. They were not face to face in that moment--they were soul to soul.

"I say--Monty," stumblingly came the words, "you know--I never dreamed of this. I thought she would have married--long ago. And she has been waiting--all these years?"

"All these years," Herne said.

"Do you think she has suffered?" There was a certain sharpness in the question, as if it were hard to utter.

And Herne, pledged to honesty, made brief reply:

"Yes."

There followed a pause; then:

"Will it grieve her--very badly--to know that I am dead?" asked the voice beside him.

"Yes, it will grieve her." Herne spoke as if compelled.

"But she will get over it, eh?"

"I believe so." Herne's lips were dry; he forced them to utterance.

The free hand fastened claw-like upon his arm.

"You'll tell me the straight truth, man," said Bobby's voice in his ear.

"What if I--came to life?"

But Herne was silent. He could not bring himself to answer.

"Speak out!" urged the voice--Bobby's voice, quick, insistent, even imploring. "Don't be afraid! I haven't any feelings left worth considering. She wouldn't get over that, you think? No woman could!"

Herne turned in desperation, and faced his questioner.

"G.o.d knows!" he said helplessly.

Again there fell a silence, such a silence as falls in a death-chamber at the moment of the spirit's pa.s.sing. The darkness was deepening. Herne could scarcely discern the figure by his side.

The hand upon his arm had grown slack. All vitality seemed to have gone out of it. It was as though the spirit had pa.s.sed indeed. And in the stillness Herne knew that he was recrossing the gulf, that his friend--the boy he had known and loved--was receding rapidly, rapidly behind the veil of years, would soon be lost to him for ever.

The voice that spoke to him at length was the voice of a stranger.

"Remember," it said, "Bobby Duncannon is dead--has been dead for years!

Let no woman waste her life waiting for him, for he will never return!

Let her marry instead the man who wants her, and put the empty years behind! In no other way will she find happiness."

"But you?" Herne groaned. "You?"

The hand he held had slipped from his grasp. Through the dimness he saw the man beside him rise to his feet. A moment he stood; then flung up his arms above his head in a fierce gesture of renunciation that sent a stab of recollection through Herne.

"I! I go to my people!" said the Prophet of the Wandis. "And you--will go to yours."

It was final, and Herne knew it; yet his heart cried out within him for the friend he had lost. Suddenly he found he could not bear it.

"Bobby! Bobby!" he burst forth impulsively. "Stop, man, stop and think!

There must be some other way. You can't--you shan't--go back!"

He hardly knew what he said, so great was his distress. The gulf was widening, widening, and he was powerless. He knew that it could never be bridged again.

"It's too big a forfeit," he urged very earnestly. "You can't do it. I won't suffer it. For Betty's sake--Bobby, come back!"

And then, for the last time, he heard his friend's voice across the ever-widening gulf.

"For Betty's sake, old chap, I am a dead man. Remember that! It's you who must go back to her. Marry her, love her, make her--forget!"

For an instant those mummy hands rested upon him, held him, caressed him; it was almost as if they blessed him. For an instant the veil was lifted; they were comrades together. Then it fell....

There came a quiet movement, the sound of departing feet.

Herne turned and blindly searched the darkness. Across the gulf he cried to his friend to return to him.

"Bobby, come back, lad, come back! We'll find some other way."

But there came no voice in answer, no sound of any sort. The desert had received back its secret. He was alone....

IX

"Now, don't bother any more about me!" commanded Betty Derwent, establishing herself with an air of finality on the edge of the trout stream to which she had just suffered herself to be conducted by her companion. "I am quite capable of baiting my own hook if necessary. You run along up-stream and have some sport on your own account!"

The companion, a very young college man, looked decidedly blank over this kindly dismissal. He had been manoeuvring to get Betty all to himself for days, but, since everybody seemed to want her, it had been no easy matter. And now, to his disgust, just as he was congratulating himself upon having gained his end and secured a _tete-a-tete_ that, with luck, might last for hours, he was coolly told to run along and amuse himself while she fished in solitude.

"I say, you know," he protested, "that's rather hard lines."

"Don't be absurd!" said Betty. "I came out to catch fish, not to talk.

And you are going to do the same."

"Oh, confound the fish!" said the luckless one.