The Great Amulet Part 20

He led her across the tent, having noted and admired his wife's skilful bit of strategy: and Lenox instinctively took the same direction.

Quita chose the chair farthest from the Palace group; and in a few moments, she knew that her husband was standing close behind her. It was the first time he had deliberately approached her since their encounter at the ball: and the silent tribute, so characteristic of the man, elated her with a renewed sense of power over a personality immeasurably stronger than her own. It was like bringing down big game after the mild diversion of shooting pheasants. But he had spent the whole morning in the verandah with Honor Desmond; and the remembrance still rankled. Upset her equanimity as he might, the spirit of surrender was still far from her.

At his approach Desmond made a slight movement, as if to rise; but the other shook his head. It was enough to be thus close to her, to feel that speech was possible, yet not compulsory. All of which Desmond was quick to understand.

"Look, . . look . . ." Quita whispered suddenly, leaning towards him.

"They are forcing that poor brute to the edge. He has been in before.

Colonel Mayhew told me. He knows; . . . he is afraid. Oh, _mon Dieu_, how horrible! . . . He is over!"

A mighty shout from the a.s.sembled thousands, who stood ten and twenty deep along the banks, confirmed her words. The shuddering victim had been forced over the ten-foot drop; and for a few breathless moments, was lost in the green swirling water. A second shout,--unanimous, as from one Gargantuan throat,--heralded the reappearance of the flat black head, with its dilated nostrils held well above the blinding wreaths of foam. Tossed mercilessly from boulder to boulder, the stout swimmer neared the first big rapid; and a moment later was swept, an unresisting log, into its treacherous clutches. Out of it he plunged, still swimming valiantly; and, despite the opposing force of the current, made a bold dash for one of the few possible landings on the town bank. But the people, foreseeing the attempt from long experience, were gathered at this particular danger-point in overwhelming numbers; with the result that the unhappy beast was fairly hustled back into the boiling stream.

Here the second rapid claimed him; and excitement became intense; for the fate of a year hung trembling in the balance. There was no shouting now; but a breathless expectant silence. Only the river,--full of sound and fury,--babbled unceasingly to the majestic sky.

The moment of uncertainty was short as it was tense. Once more the brave black head appeared, a blot on the foam-flecked surface, no longer battling, with dilated nostrils, against fearful odds; but lying sideways, inert . . . lifeless; . . . and a prolonged outburst of shouting, clapping, and huzzaing informed the echoing hills that the great spirit of rivers and streams had accepted the sacrifice; that the luck of the State was established for twelve good months to come.

"Poor beast, poor plucky beast!" Quita murmured rebelliously. Her sympathies had been strangely stirred; and an unbidden moisture clouded her eyes. In that hapless drowned buffalo she beheld, not a mere dead animal, but one victim the more to the eternal law of sacrifice;--the law that makes one man's suffering the price of another man's gain;--the law that lies at the root of half the tragedy of the world.

"How happy they all are!" she went on. "That Rajah boy is delighted.

They have no imaginations these people. So much the better for them!"

By now the _shamianah_ hummed with talk and laughter and congratulation on the outcome of the _Mela_. Every one had risen; and Desmond turned with the rest to add his quota to the polite speeches that were the order of the moment.

But Quita, still intent upon the stirring scene without, moved forward a little s.p.a.ce to obtain a better view of the river and the crowd.

Lenox followed her; and with a start she became aware that he was standing almost at her elbow; though still a little behind her, so that she must turn if she wanted to see his face.

"Are you wishing you could put some of that on canvas?" he asked in a voice that he vainly strove to render natural.

"Yes. It would be such a triumphant riot of colour. But I'm afraid it would look crude and impossible in any frame except the frame of an Indian sky."

She did not turn in speaking; but the softness of her voice soothed his chafed spirit like a benediction, and robbed him for the moment of all power to reply.

"I was really trying to stamp it all on my memory," she went on after a pause. "It is a sight one doesn't see twice in a lifetime. Just for a few seconds it was terrible. But I would not have missed it for the world."

"Nor I. Now that I am here, I feel grateful to the Desmonds for persuading me to come."

"Did they have to drag you here by main force?"

"Not quite! I thought I had better stay and grind at my book; that was all. But they wouldn't hear of it."

"Do you always obey their orders implicitly?" There was veiled scorn in her tone, and a new warmth in his as he replied:

"I would do any mortal thing they asked me to, within reason. In all my life no two people have been so good to me."

"You evidently admire _her_ very much." The stress on the p.r.o.noun was too delicate to catch his notice.

"I do, immensely. How could any man in his senses do otherwise? Or, for that matter, any woman either? I hoped--I thought--you would have been good friends with her."

He spoke his honest enthusiasm in the simple desire that she should share it. But her nerves were still strung to concert pitch, and he had struck the wrong note.

"You thought her many virtues might have an improving effect on me, I suppose?"

The acorn was no longer veiled: and he winced under it.

"No: only is occurred to me that the two . . . . best women I have ever known might reasonably have a good deal in common."

"It is kind of you to couple me with her. I am flattered, I a.s.sure you!--But, personally, I prefer something lees exalted, something more human, more fallible. . . ."

"Perhaps that explains your predilection for Garth?" he broke in abruptly, p.r.i.c.ked to resentment by her persistent note of mockery.

"I am not aware that my friendship with Major Garth requires any sort of explanation."

She was rigid now--face, voice, figure: his golden opportunity gone past recall. Men pay as dearly for sins of ignorance as for the baser kinds of trespa.s.s: and the man who does not understand women is almost worse, in their esteem, that the man who treats them ill.

"Is it wise--for your own sake . . . to be so careless of your good name?" he persisted desperately; goaded by the knowledge that he would not soon get speech of her again.

"Possibly not. But I don't feel called upon to retire into a convent, or to advertise the fact that I am not . . . 'on the market.' Nor do I choose to have my conduct called in question by any man living."

She faced him now;--defiant, a bright spot on either cheek.

And before he knew how to answer her, Colonel Mayhew was upon them, overflowing with cheerful raillery, and radiantly unaware that he had stepped into a powder magazine.

Long before the returning procession reached the Residency, Quita had repented of her little-minded display of irritation, consoling herself with the resolve that she would atone for it next time; whereas Lenox had decided that for once Honor Desmond's intuition was at fault: that it needed no 'bogey of heredity' to widen the impa.s.sable gulf dividing him from his wife.

CHAPTER XI.

"O all that in me wanders, and is wild, Gathers into one wave, and breaks on thee."

--Phillips.

In the deep heart of Kalatope Forest, where the trees fall apart as if by unanimous consent, the natural glade of Kajiar lies like a giant emerald under a turquoise sky. Peace broods over this sanctuary of Nature's making, dove-like, with folded wings. No lightest echo of the world's turmoil and strife disturbs the stillness. Only at dawn and dusk, the thin note of the temple bell, the chanting of priests, and the unearthly minor wail of conches, announce the downsitting and uprising of the little stone image of G.o.dhead, housed in a picturesque temple that nestles among low trees, beside the Holy Lake, at the southern end of the glade.

For Hindus are the most devout Nature-worshippers on the face of the earth. To them, beauty of place translates itself as G.o.d's direct cry to the soul; and in the isolated glade of Kajiar, with its sweep of shelving turf, its encircling pines and deodars, and its towering snow-peaks standing sentinel in the north,--deity reigns supreme; deity and the great grey ape of the Himalayas.

Only for one week in the year does Kajiar spring full-fledged into a place of human significance. From Dalhousie, on the one hand, and from Chumba on the other, a light-hearted crowd of revellers profanes the quiet of earth and sky. On the outskirts of the forest tents spring up, like mushrooms, in a night; the devotional voices of the temple are drowned in the clamour of bugles, the throb of racing hoofs, the challenging gaiety of the band, and the heart-stirring wail of the Royal Chumba Pipers; wiry hill-men, in kilts and tartans;--the pride of the young Rajah's heart.

The 'Kajiar week' is the central event of Dalhousie's season:--an Arcadian revel of perfumed shadow, and sun-warmed earth; a carnival of camp-life; ushering in the gloom of the Great Rains;--the triple tyranny of mist, mildew, and mackintoshes. And early on the morning after the _Mela_,--while the breath of night still lingered in gorges and ravines, and in shadowed patches of the ascending path, a mixed procession of men and horses, shuffling mules, and trotting coolies wound, snake-like, out of the Chumba valley towards Kalatope Forest and the emerald glade.

All the Rajah's party was mounted, save Mrs Mayhew and the medical missionary's wife, who preferred the leisurely ease of their dandies: and in the van of the procession, a hundred yards and more in advance of it, Quita rode with James Garth.

Her husband's bearing throughout the previous evening had convinced her that their pa.s.sage of arms in the _shamianah_ had killed the budding possibility of a better understanding between them: and the fact that she was to blame, did not make the knowledge easier to bear. For she knew now--knew consciously--that she craved the love and admiration of this big silent husband of hers, as she had never yet craved anything in earth or heaven: that his mere presence disturbed every fibre of her in a fashion she had hitherto believed impossible; that his aloofness drew and held her, as no other man's ardour had ever done. These two days of closer contact, of hearing his voice, of watching, without seeming to watch, the familiar movements of his face and figure, had waked to conscious life germs that had long lain at her heart, quickening in darkness.

But pride was a stubborn element in her. Where she gave greatly, she demanded greatly. The fact that he had taken her to task bred a suspicion that she had been sought out for that purpose, not because he could no longer keep away: and his evident determination to give her no chance of retrieving the damage done in a moment of irritation, brought her near to defiance,--the danger-point of her nature. Hence renewed encouragement of Garth, with intent to italicise her Declaration of Independence; and with a half-acknowledged hope that Lenox might be goaded by jealousy to renewed remonstrance.

And Garth,--who was used to the bestowal, rather than the receipt of favours,--accepted this woman's encouragement as gratefully as an enamoured subaltern. Desmond's recent tactics had but served to convince him that the walls of Jericho must be carried by a.s.sault. Whatever the outcome, the thrill of conquest must at least be his.

The six-foot roadway up to Kajiar gave him ample excuse for riding needlessly close to his companion; and he inclined himself closer in talking, thus giving a provocative flavour to ordinary speech.