The Bronze Bell Part 45

"Not another word, my dear Miss Farrell!" Labertouche protested, acutely uncomfortable. "To've been able to help you out of the sc.r.a.pe is enough."

"But I must--" she began, and stopped with a little cry as a shot rang out from the heart of the thicket, to be followed by another and then by a shriek of agony and a great confusion of sounds--shouts and oaths and noisy crashings in the tamarisks as of many men blundering hither and yon.

Silenced, with a slight shudder of apprehension, the girl drew to Amber's side, as if instinctively. He took her hand and drew it through his arm.

"Run to earth at last!" cried Labertouche. "I wonder--"

"If my hope's good for anything," Amber laughed, less because he felt like laughing than for the purpose of rea.s.suring Sophia, "this will be the gentleman who trained the Hooded Death to dance, or else he who--"

He was thinking with vindictive relish of what fate he would mete out to the manipulator of the Bell, were it left to him to pa.s.s sentence.

But he broke off as a body of soldiery burst from the tamarisks, and, headed by young Rowan, hurried toward the three, bringing with them a silent and unresisting prisoner.

"I say," the officer called excitedly in advance, "here's something uncommon' rum. It's a woman, you know."

"Aha!" said Labertouche, and "Ah!" said Amber, "with a click of his teeth, while the woman on his arm clung to him the closer.

"I thought we'd better bring her to you, for she said ..." Rowan paused, embarra.s.sed, and took a fresh start. "My men got to the ford just as she was coming ash.o.r.e with three other men, and the whole pack took to cover on this side. Two of the men are still missing, but we routed out the other just now with this--ah--lady. He showed fight and got bayonetted. But the woman--excuse me, Mr. Amber--she protests--by George, it's too ridiculous!--"

"I have claimed naught that is not true!" an unforgettably sweet voice interrupted from the centre of the group. It opened out, disclosing Naraini between two guards, in that moment of pa.s.sion and fear perhaps more incomparably beautiful than any woman they had ever looked upon, save her who held to Amber's arm, a-quiver with womanly sympathy and compa.s.sion.

During her flight and her resistance Naraini's veil had been rent away; in the clear starlight her countenance, framed in hair of l.u.s.trous jet and working with uncontrollable rage and despair, shone like that of some strange tempestuous Aphrodite fashioned of palest gold. Beneath its folds of tightly drawn, bespangled gauze her bosom swelled and fell convulsively, and on her perfect arms, more softly beautiful than any Phidias ever dreamed to chisel, the golden bracelets and bangles clashed and tinkled as she writhed and fought to free herself of the defiling hands. Half-mad with disappointment, she raged amid the scattered shreds of her dream of power like a woman hopelessly deranged.

"Aye, I have claimed!" she stormed. "I have claimed justice and the rights of wifehood, the protection of him whose wife I am; or, if he deny me, I claim that he must suffer with me--he who hath played the traitor's part to-night, betraying his Cause and his wife alike to their downfall!... I claim," she insisted, lifting, in spite of the soldiers' restraining hands, one small quivering arm to single Amber out and point him to scorn, "that this is the man who, wedded to me by solemn right and the custom of the land, hath deserted and abandoned me, hath denied me even as he denies his birthright, when it doth please him, and forswears the faith of his fathers! I claim to be Naraini, Queen, wife to Har Dyal Rutton, rightful ruler of Khandawar--coward, traitor, renegade--who stands there!"

"For the love of Heaven, Rowan, shut her up!" cried Labertouche. "It's all a pack of lies; the woman's raving. Rutton's dead, in the first place; in the second, he's her father. She can't be his wife very well, whether he's alive or dead. It's simply a dodge of hers to gain time.

Shut her up and take her away--she's as dangerous as a wildcat!"

"Nay, I will not be gagged nor taken hence till I have said my say!"

With a sudden furious wrench Naraini wrested her arms from the grasp of the guards and sprang away, eluding with lithe and snake-like movements their attempts to recapture her. "Not," she cried, "until I have wrought my will upon the two of them. Thou hast stood in my light too long, O my sister!"

A hand blazing with jewels tore at the covering of her bosom and suddenly came away clutching a dagger, thin, long, and keen; and snarling she sprang toward the girl, to whose influence, however unwitting, she rightly ascribed the downfall of her scheme of empire.

Rowan and Labertouche leaped forward and fell short, so lightning swift she moved; only Amber stood between her and her vengeance. Choking with horror, he put the girl behind him with a resistless hand, and took Naraini to his arms.

"Ah, hast thou changed thy mind, Beloved?" The woman caught him fiercely to her with an arm about his waist, and her voice rose shrill with mocking triumph, "Are my lips become so sweet to thee again? Then see how I kiss, thou fool!"

She thrust with wicked cunning, twice and again, before the men tore her away and disarmed her. For an instant wrestling like a demon with them, still animated by her murderous frenzy, still wishful to fill her cup of vengeance to the brim with the blood of the girl, she of a sudden ceased to resist and fell pa.s.sive in their hands, a dying flicker of satisfaction in the eyes that watched the culmination of her crime....

To Amber it was as if his body had been penetrated thrice by a needle of fire. The anguish of it was exquisite, stupefying. He was aware of a darkening, reeling world, wherein men's faces swam like moons, pallid, staring, and of a mighty and invincible lethargy that pounced upon him, body, brain and soul, like a black panther springing from the ambush of the night. Yet there were still words that must be spoken, lest they live in his subconsciousness to torment him through all the long, black night that was to receive him. He tried to steady himself, and lifted an arm that vibrated like the sprung limb of a sapling, signing to the secret-agent.

"_Labertouche_," he said thickly ... "_Sophia ... out of India ... at once ... life_ ..."

The girl's arms received him as he fell.

CHAPTER XX

A LATER DAY

A man awoke from a long dream of night and fear, of pa.s.sion, pain, and death, and opened eyes whose vision seemed curiously clear, to realise a new world, very unlike that in which the incoherent action of his dream had moved--a world of light and lively air, as sweet and wholesome as glistening white paint, sunshine, and an abundance of pure, cool air could render it.

Because he had known these things in a former existence, he understood that he lay in the lower berth of a first-cabin stateroom, aboard an ocean steamship; a s.p.a.cious, bright box of a room, through whose open ports swayed brilliant shafts of temperate sunlight, together with great gusts of the salt sweet breath of the open sea. Through them, too, he could see patches of unclouded blue, athwart which now and again gulls would sweep on flashing, motionless pinions.

The man lay still and at peace, watching, wondering idly, soothed by the sense of being swung through s.p.a.ce, only vaguely conscious of the plunging pulsations of the ship's engines, hammering away indomitably far in the hold beneath him. His thoughts busied themselves lightly with a number of important questions, to whose answers the man realised that he was singularly indifferent. Who was he? What had happened to bring him back to life (for he was sure that he had died, a long time ago)? How had he come to that stateroom? What could the name of the vessel be? Where ... Deep thoughts were these and long; the man drowsed over them, but presently was aroused by the sensation of being no longer alone, of being watched.

His eyeb.a.l.l.s seemed to move reluctantly in their sockets, and his head felt very light and empty, although so heavy that he could not lift it from the pillow. But he managed to shift his gaze from the window until it rested upon a man's face--a gaunt, impa.s.sive brown face illuminated by steady and thoughtful eyes, filled with that mystic, unshakable spirit of fatalism that is the real Genius of the eastern peoples. The head itself stood out with almost startling distinctness against the background of pure white. It was swathed with an immaculate white turban. The thin, stringy brown neck ran into a loose surtout of snowy white.

The sick man felt that he recognised this countenance--had known it, rather, in some vague, half-remembered life before his latest death.

The name...? He felt his lips move and that they were thin and glazed.

Moistening them with his tongue he made another attempt to articulate.

A thin whisper pa.s.sed them in two breaths: "Ram ... Nath ..."

Hearing this, the dark man started out of his abstraction, cast a swift, pitiful glance at the sick man's face, and came to hold a tumbler to his lips. The liquid, colourless, acrid, and pungent, slipped into his mouth, and he had to swallow whether he would or no.

When the final drop disappeared, Ram Nath put down the gla.s.s, smiled, laid a finger on his lips, and went on tiptoe from the stateroom.

After awhile the man without an ident.i.ty fell asleep, calmly, restfully, in absolute peace. When again he awakened it was with the knowledge that he was David Amber, and that a woman sat beside him.

Her face was turned from him, and her brown eyes, clouded with dreams, were staring steadfastly out through the open port; the flowing banners of sunshine now and again touched her hair with quick fire--her wonderfully spun hair, itself scarcely less radiant than the light that illumined it. Against the blue-white background her gracious profile showed womanly and sweet. There was rich colour in cheeks fresh from the caress of the sea wind. She smiled in her musing, scarlet lips apart.

"Sophia..."

His voice sounded in his own hearing very thin and brittle. The girl turned her gaze upon him swiftly, the soft smile deepening, the dream-light in her eyes burning brighter and more steady. She bent forward, placing over his wasted hand a hand firm and warm, strong yet gentle, its whiteness enhanced by the suggested tracery of blue veins beneath the silken skin, and by the rosy tips of her slender, subtle fingers.

"David!" she said.

He sighed and remembered. His brows knitted, then smoothed themselves out; for with memory came the realisation that, since he was there and she by his side, G.o.d was surely in his Heaven, all well with the world!

"How long...Sophia?"

"Five days, David."

"Where...?"

"At sea, David, on a _Messageries_ boat for Ma.r.s.eilles. Dear ..."

He closed his eyes in beatific content: "David ... Dear ...!"

"Can you listen?"

"Yes ... sweetheart."

Her voice faltered; she flushed adorably. "You mustn't talk. But I'll tell you.... They refused to let us go back to Kuttarpur; an escort took us across the desert to Nok, you in a litter, I on horseback.

There we took train to Haidarabad and Karachi. Ram Nath came with us, as bearer, it being necessary that he too should leave India. My father and your man Doggott joined us at Karachi, where this steamer touched the second day."

"You understand, now--?"

"Everything, dearest."