Son of Power Part 12

"My people. They are coming for me--good-bye---"

The last few words had been just for him; the tone might have come up from the centre of himself.

Skag was alone, but he did not hurry into the city. There was more in the solitude than ever before, more mystery in the jungle, more in the dusty scent of the open road. Greater than all, in spite of all doubting and realisation of insignificance, there was unquestionably more in himself.

Early the next morning, Skag was abroad in the city and saw the two priests of Hanuman approach Ratna Ram. They raised their hands in silent greeting as he came near and immediately arose and turned toward Carlin's bungalow. Skag was glad to follow, when they signified he might, for the thing at hand was his own deep concern. There was a catch in his throat as Carlin appeared on the verandah. Her eyes met Skag's before she spoke to the priests.

"Is he worse?"

The elder spoke for both, as is the custom:

"Peace be on thee, thou of gentle voice and skillful hands. We greet thee in the name of Hanuman; and are come, to render up to thee the forfeit life, even according to our covenant; for thou hast saved the wounded king, and he will not die. Behold the cloth with the shape of the foreigner's sign in it; this we held for a token that the foreigner's life was ours: this we render now to thee. His life is thine and not ours."

The old man laid the silk kerchief at Carlin's feet.

Skag had thought the danger over yesterday, but he saw that the young Englishman's life held in ransom, had only just now been returned to the girl. . . . That forenoon was the time to Skag of the great tension. Carlin had stood for a moment longer than necessary on the verandah, after the priests had turned away. It was as if she would speak--but that might signify anything or nothing. It was just a point that made the hours more breathless now, like the sentence of quick low tones last night, when the voices of her people were heard at the edge of the jungle. Were these everything or nothing--glamour or life-lock?

Often he remembered that her eyes had sought his to-day, even before looking to the priests for news.

He stood at the edge of the jungle at high noon. The city was filmed in heat. Faint sounds seemed to come out of the sky. Skag was watching one certain road. The trance of stillness was not broken. He turned back into the green shade. . . . He would not delay in Hurda.

He would not linger. His friend Cadman had been gone for some days.

Yet about going there was a new and intolerable pain.

Skag forced himself back from the clearing. He felt less than himself with his eyes fixed upon that certain road; a man always does when he wants something terribly. Still he did not enter the deep jungle. At last he heard a step. He turned very slowly, not at all like a man to whom the greatest thing of all has happened. . . . Carlin had come and was saying:

". . . I heard voices in the house this morning when you came. Someone was listening, so I could not speak. . . . Something keeps growing--something about our work in the jungle. I want to go to the monkey glen again--now."

It was like unimaginable riches. There were moments in which he had counterpart thoughts for hers in his own mind; as if she spoke from another lobe of his own brain. Her words expressed himself.

"I thought you would be here," she told him presently. "I wanted to see you again."

She was flushed from crossing the broad area tranced in noon heat; and now the green cool of the jungle was sweet to her, and they were close together, but walking not so slowly as last night. . . . Loneliness came to them when they reached the empty place where the wounded one had lain in the shelter of the rock. They felt strangely excluded from something that had belonged to them. All the wide branches above were empty. Still that was only one breath of chill. Tides of life brimmed high between them; they had vast mercies to spare for outer sorrows.

"He may not have done so well after being moved," she whispered.

Skag was thinking of the cough he had heard. The monkeys had understood that. . . . Just now the younger of the two priests of Hanuman appeared magically. There was quiet friendliness deep in his calm, desireless eyes.

"All is well," he told them. "They have carried their king to a yet more secret place, where we may not--"

He did not finish that sentence but added: "Only we who serve them may go there. All is well. They would not have moved him, had they not been sure that life was established in him."

The priest did not linger. Then Carlin wanted to know everything--how India had called Skag at the very first. . . . Was it all jungle and animal interest; or was he called a little to the holy men? Did he not yearn to help in the great famine and fever districts; long to enter the deep depravities of the lower cities with healing?

Skag had listened in a kind of pa.s.sion. Wonderful unfoldment in regard to these things had come to him from Cadman Sahib, but as Carlin touched upon them, they loomed up in his mind like the slow approach to cities from a desert. Carlin's eyes, turned often to his, were like all the shadows of the jungle gathered to two points of essential dark, and pinned by a star veiled in its own light.

"I thought it was only the wild animals that called to me, but now I know better," he said. "And my friend Cadman, who has gone, opened so much to me. He often spoke of the holy men, until one had to be interested--"

Carlin halted and drew back looking at him with a kind of still strength all her own.

"You do not know that the natives think _you_ are something of the kind?"

"I--a holy man?"

"I heard them speak of you last night. You see they have heard of your deliverance of the Gra.s.s Jungle people."

Skag was learning how wonderfully news travels in India.

"Of course, it was all easy to believe, after what I saw--"

"What did you see?" he asked.

"That the two priests of Hanuman permitted you to follow them here--"

Then Carlin verified what Cadman had said, that the priests make no mistakes in these things. . . . Presently Skag was listening to accounts of Carlin's life. He was insatiable to hear all. In some moments of the telling, it was like a phantom part of himself that he was questing for, through her words. Her story ran from the Vindhas to the Western Ghat mountains, touching plain and height and sh.o.r.e (but not yet High Himalaya), touching tree jungle, civil station, railway station and cantonments; stories including a succession of marvellous names of cities and men; intimations that many great servants of India and England were of her name; that she had seven living brothers, all older; all at work over India. Finally Skag heard that Carlin had spent eight years in England studying medicine and surgery, and again that the natives called her the _Gul Moti_, which means the Rose Pearl; or _Hakima_, which means physician. But her own name was Carlin!

When they came back to the edge of the jungle again, it was the hour of afterglow. Its colours entered into him and were always afterward identified with her. Carlin left him, laughingly, abruptly; and Skag was so full of the wonder of all the world, that he had not thought to ask if he should ever see her again.

As night came on, Skag thought more and more of the parting; and that there had been no words about Carlin's coming again. He felt himself living breathlessly towards the thought of seeing her; and it was not long before this fervour itself awoke within him a counter resistance.

Manifestly this pain and yearning and tension--was not the way to the full secret. As carefully stated before, Skag approved emphatically of the Now. The present moving point was the best he had at any given time. He thought a man should forget himself in the Now--like the animals.

Yet the hours tortured. That night had little sleep for him, and the marvels of Carlin--face and voice, laugh, heart, hand--grew upon him contrary to all precedent. This was a battle against all the wild animals rolled into one; most terribly, a battle because there seemed such a beauty about the yearning which the girl awoke in him.

He was abroad early next day. The thought had come, that she might find him in the jungle at noon or soon afterward as yesterday. As the dragging forenoon wore on, Skag was in tightening tension. He hated himself for this, but the fact stubbornly remained that all he cared for in the world was the meeting again. It seemed greater than he--this agony of separation. It brought all fears and self-diminishing. It told him that Carlin would run from him, if she knew he wanted her presence so. He knew her kind of woman loves self-conquest--the man who can powerfully wait and not be victimised by his own emotions. . . .

So it was that Skag fled from himself, when there was still a half hour before noon. He could not meet her, longing like this.

There was sweat on Skag's forehead as his limbs quickened away from the place of meeting yesterday. The more he left it behind, the more sure he became that Carlin would come. It seemed he was casting away the one dear and holy thing he had ever known--yet it resolved to this: that he dared not stand before her with his heart beating as if he had run for miles and his chest suffocating with emotions--the very features of his face uncertain, his voice unreliable. . . . If a man entered the cage of a strange tiger, as little master of himself as this--it would be taking his life in his own silly hands. Skag couldn't get past this point, and he had a romantic adjustment in his mind about Carlin and the tiger--one all his own.

Deeper and deeper into the jungle he went, along the little river, but all paths appeared to lead him to the monkey glen; and there he sat down at last and remembered all that Alec Binz had told him about handling himself in relation to handling animals, and all that Cadman Sahib had told him from the lips of wise men of India . . . but all that Skag could find was pain--rising, thickening clouds of pain.

He kept seeing her continually as she entered the jungle (walking so silently and swift, her face flushed from crossing the open s.p.a.ce this side of the city in the terrible heat of noon)--and then not finding him there. Something about this hurt like degrading a sacred thing, but he didn't mean to. He repeated that he didn't mean to hurt her. . . . Then suddenly it occurred to him that it was all his own thinking about her coming at noon. There had been no word about it.

She might not have thought of coming again. This was like a cold breath through the jungle. It was as intolerable as the other thought of her disappointment.

. . . There was an almost indistinguishable _slithering_ of soft pads in the branches. Skag looked up suddenly and the air seemed jerked with a concussion of his start. The monkeys were back. They had been watching, the branches filling. When he looked up, the whole company stirred nervously.

Skag laughed. It was good. There was but one formulated thought--that Carlin would be glad to hear this; she would appreciate this. The return of the monkeys had a deep significance to Skag, because he had really first seen the wonder of Carlin just here--working over the wounded one. The immediate tree-lanes were filled with watchers in suffocating tension then. It was curiosity now--nothing covered, but playful. Skag wished he could chant like the priests, for the monkey-folk. He wished he had many baskets of chapattis to spread out upon the gra.s.ses for them. . . . As he sat, face-lifted, he heard that tiger-cough again.

The monkeys huddled a second--it was panic--then they melted from sight. It was like the swift blowing away one by one, of the top papers of a deep pile on a desk.

Skag was now essentially absorbed. It couldn't be a mistake. The monkeys knew. He himself knew from days and nights with the big cats.

There was no cough just like that. It was in a different direction from before, back toward the city this time, but as before, m.u.f.fled and close down to the riverbed. . . . Nothing of the cub left in that cough; neither was there hurry or hunger or any particular rage or fear. A big beast finishing a sleep, down in some sandy niche by the river; a solitary beast full of years, a bit drowsy just this moment, and in no particular hurry to take up the hunt. Such was the picture that came to Skag with a keen kind of enjoyment. The thrill had lifted his misery for a minute. This was something to cope with. It took away the heart-breaking sense of inadequacy.

It wasn't the thrill of a hunt that animated Skag. The fact is, he hadn't even a six-shooter along. This was the closeness of the real thing again--the deep joy, perhaps, of testing outside of cages once more, the power that had never failed. And just now along the river and beyond the place where the cough came from--Carlin was coming!

The last of the monkeys had flicked away. Skag arose and held his hand high, palm toward her. She beckoned, but still came forward. Skag moved without haste, but rapidly. All the beauty and wonder of Carlin was the same; it lived in his heart, integrate and unparalleled as ever, but some power had come to him from the cough of the tiger.

Around all the fear, even for her life, was the one splendid thing--that she had followed him into the monkey glen.