The Great Amulet Part 54

"In a hundred ages of the G.o.ds I could not tell thee of the glory of Himachal. As the dew is dried up by the sun, so are the sins of mankind, by the glory of Himachal."--_From the Hindu_.

That night Eldred Lenox slept long, and dreamlessly; and awoke with new life throbbing in his veins. The three uneventful days that followed were among the happiest in his life; and on the fourth, before sunset, the two women set out, in hospital doolies, on their primitive journey to Sheik Budeen.

Honor had protested, almost to tears, at being compelled to spend a fortnight with her heart in two places, and her body in a third! But Desmond, reinforced by John Meredith, had held his own; promising to escort her to the barren Rock of Refuge, whose only virtue was its elevation; and, by arranging a relay of ponies along the route, gallop back in time for 'orderly room' next morning. "Which is more than nine husbands out of ten would do for a headstrong wife!" Meredith had concluded, stroking her flushed cheek: and thus the matter had been settled.

Lenox and Quita spent the last afternoon together in their own bungalow, at her suggestion. The officious chowkidar unearthed two punkah coolies for the occasion: and the planning of their future home, a picnic tea served on Eldred's writing-table, and practical considerations in respect of furniture and house linen--though Quita had small inherent regard for either!--helped, more or less, to obscure the thought of separation. Before leaving the bungalow, she won through the dreaded last injunctions and kisses without ignominious collapse, since Lenox was to ride out for a few miles beside the doolie; and they parted finally with brave words, and a prolonged hand-clasp that left her fingers tingling for a good five minutes afterwards.

Quita never forgot that journey. Its weird fascination, clashing with the ache of parting, stamped every detail indelibly upon her memory;--the vast, featureless plain, empty as a widow's heart; the lavish moonlight poured out upon it like water, flowing unhindered to the naked spurs of the frontier hills, whose huge shoulders, peaks, and escarpments blotted out the stars along the western horizon; the occasional appearance of wild-looking Waziri militia-men, from the chain of outposts along the foothills, who had been warned to keep up a sharp look-out along the road: no villages; no trees; no sound or movement anywhere, save the distorted shadows and rythmical grunting of her doolie-bearers, the soft shuffling of their feet, and the click of hoofs, as Desmond rode at a foot's pace beside his wife, or dismounting, walked and talked with her, his bridle slung over his arm.

The suggestion of tenderness and companionship in their low tones seemed to accentuate the lifeless desolation through which they moved, the blankness and uncertainty of the anxious months ahead. Possibly something of this occurred to Desmond; for after the first few miles he deserted his wife now and again, and walked by Quita; exorcising the spirit of self-torment that haunts the imaginative, as he of all men best knew how to do.

Finally, lulled by the movement of the doolie, she fell asleep; and awoke to find herself in a changed world; a world of rough-cut volcanic rock and boulder, piled up on either hand in fantastic disarray; a world of white light and sharp black shadows; of mystery, and terror, and uncanny beauty. It was as if she had been transported back to the morning of Time, when the earth giants wrenched up the mountains, and pelted one another in pure sport: and as she flung back the loose flap of her doolie to get a wider view of it all, Desmond trotted up to her.

"It's less alarming than it looks," he rea.s.sured her. "We have only turned off into the Paizu Pa.s.s. It's a nasty dangerous bit of road; but our own men are on ahead, so we're safe enough. We shall be climbing the hill directly; and I'll be uncommonly glad of my _chota hazri_."

"You deserve it, you poor fellow! But it sounds an anachronism! I can't believe that anything so commonplace as a bungalow, with servants and tea and toast, exists within a hundred miles of this primeval nakedness."

But in the fulness of time, bungalow, tea, and servants were all forthcoming: and between three and four of the morning their fantastic journey culminated in a prosaic meal of eggs and b.u.t.tered toast. When it was over Quita vanished, leaving Desmond alone with his wife; and before moonset he was speeding back along the road they had come; covering the fifty miles at a hand-gallop, in something less than five hours.

A fortnight later two very unwilling gra.s.s-widows were rescued by Lenox, who had secured his sick leave; and who escorted them from Dera Ishmael as far as Lah.o.r.e, where he left them to go on into the mountain region beyond Kashmir.

Hillmen have a saying, 'Who goes to the hills goes to his mother'; and Eldred Lenox, a hillman both by love and lineage, confirmed it for the hundredth time, as he pushed his way upward, by leisurely enchanting stages, from the steaming Punjab, through the great natural gateway of the Baramullah Pa.s.s, a towering defile, thunderous with full-fed torrents and waterfalls, into the familiar Valley, . . a very sanctuary of peace; its terraced slopes splashed with the vivid green of rice-fields, the russet and gold of ripe orchards and cornlands; up through Srinagar, 'the City of the Sun,' of carved and gilded temples, thronged waterways, and flat house-tops blazoned with flowers; and yet again upward, by ways well known to him, into the hidden mysteries of the mountains ma.s.sed about the valleys; a mighty conclave of immortals brooding in majestic meditation; shrouded at this season by dazzling continents of cloud; and plunging green arms to the rivers and lakes, that gleamed like molten silver under a pale sky.

To know a character rightly it should be seen in its natural element; and the Lenox of the Himalayas was by no means the same man as the Lenox of the Plains. All his latent energy and vigour blossomed out like flowers at the first whisper of spring. 'The glory of Himachal'

drew and penetrated and inspired him like nothing else on earth.

Here he tracked and brought down oonyal, markhor, and the great mountain sheep; explored on a small scale, because the fever of going was upon him; and slept as a man only sleeps when he is living close to the heart of Nature. Here, also,--fortified by solitude, by the uplifting sense of things awful and divine which is the gift of great mountains to those who love them,--he fought doggedly and systematically against a craving that persisted in spite of improved health. For the tyranny of opium is as tenacious as it is deadly; and the habit of five years is not to be broken in as many weeks. But the man who wills to conquer evil has G.o.d and Nature fighting on his side: and in the teeth of several flagrant lapses, Lenox made steady progress.

In Srinagar he bought a bottle of chlorodyne; and two days later flung it down the _khud_. When his store of drugged tobacco ran out, he replaced it by a brand in which an innocuous admixture of opium just sufficed to produce the faint fragrance that he loved. The black fits of melancholy, which were native to his temperament, and which, in the past five years, had threatened to dominate him permanently, evaporated like morning fogs before the sun as the certainty grew in him that he must prevail: and Quita, who had done most of the harm, made unconscious reparation by letters whose consummate faith in the final issue was stimulating as the mountain air itself.

By October he was back at Dera Ishmael Khan;--a renewed man, bronzed and vigorous, the shadow gone from his eyes; testing his achievement and finding that it held good; bending all his energies to the task of fitting up a home for his wife; a task whereof Honor usurped as large a share as he would permit. Then, towards the end of the month, he wrote to Quita: "Come. We are ready, and waiting for you,--the house, Zyarulla, Brutus, and your impatient husband, who will pick you up at Lah.o.r.e."

And on the last day of October, more than six years after their hasty wedding, Eldred and Quita Lenox entered upon their married life.

"Have you forgotten, darling, the nonsense I talked that day about the House, and the Enchanted Palace?" she asked, as they stood together on their first evening in the drawing-room, whose every detail he had planned with elaborate care.

"Is it likely? Why?"

His arm was round her shoulders; and putting up one hand she touched his face.

"Why . . because I said we would have to begin with the House. But we seem to have reached the Enchanted Palace before starting after all?"

"By a very roundabout route," he answered, a suspicion of the old sadness in his eyes.

"Yes; but we _have_ reached it. That's the main point, dear Pessimist; and the commonplace House I offered you has tumbled into a dust-heap of ruins. Don't let's build it up again, whatever else we may do in the way of foolishness. Retrogression is the one unforgiveable sin!"

It is the instinctive cry of love in the first flush of fulfilment.

The grand impulsion of man to woman brushes aside lesser considerations like so many flies. But Life and Temperament, standing discreetly in the background, will have their say in the 'fateful second act' of the human comedy before the curtain drops.

CHAPTER XXVI.

"Climb high, love high, what matter! Still . . .

Feet, feelings, must descend the hill."

--Browning.

On a certain afternoon of early March, Quita Lenox stood at her easel, in the small room she had fitted up as a studio, palette in one hand, long-handled brush in the other, two broken lines of irritation between her brows.

The verandah door stood wide; and through it the breath of spring came in to her, velvet soft, compact of a hundred nameless scents, mingled with the paramount scent of roses. For March is India's rose month: and in the midst of so much that is unlovely, the roses of Dera Ishmael Khan are things to marvel at, and thank Heaven for. Quita's rambling compound was packed with them, from the plebeian Cabbage, to the lordly Marechal Neil. Three golden buds of the latter drooped over the white ribbon bow at her waist: and a bowl of dark red ones stood on the untidy table behind her.

But even the subtle-sweet influence of the day failed to sooth the creases out of her forehead. For the panel picture on her easel would not 'behave'; her scattered ideas refused to range themselves: and the fount of inspiration seemed dried up within her: trifles insignificant enough to the 'lay' mind: but for the artist, whether of pencil, or brush, or chisel, they spell despair. All the morning she had wrestled with the picture half defiantly, as it were against the stream. Such work is seldom satisfactory; and since lunch she had been engaged in blotting it all out ruthlessly, bit by bit.

The refractory creation of her spirit was a small panel in oils: a subject picture, more or less symbolical, such as she did not often attempt:--a broken hillside, of Himalayan character: bare blocks of granite, dripping with recent rain, their dark corners and interstices alight with shy wild flowers and ferns: a stone-set path zigzagging among them, and half-way up the path, the figures of a man and woman: the man ahead, upon a jutting ledge of rock, half turning with down-stretched hand to draw the woman up after him, his vigorous form backed by a sky of driving cloud. Of the woman's face, as she lifted it to his, nothing could be seen save the outline of cheek and brow.

Her bowed shoulders and the lines of her figure expressed effort, tinged with weariness. Below her, the topmost half of a deodar sprang upward, a suggestion of wind in its drooping bows: and through torn grey cloud, a sun-ray, striking across the two figures, waked coppery gleams in the woman's dark hair, and points of brightness on drenched rock and fern.

All these things were as yet conveyed rather than expressed: the figures, in particular, being still little more than studies suggesting both the strain and exhilaration of ascent. On a strip of cardboard propped above the canvas, four lines were scribbled in pencil.

"Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day's journey take the whole long day?

From morn till night, my friend."

Quita read and pondered the words for the hundredth time: but the hint of melancholy in them only increased her vague feeling of annoyance, and the lines deepened between her brows.

It was her first serious attempt at a picture after four months of idleness, and 'amateur scribblings'--so she designated them in her letters to Michael; and for the time being brain and hand seemed to have lost their cunning. She needed the stimulant of criticism, of discussion, to oil the wheels and set the machine going afresh. If only Michael were here, how they would have argued and squabbled, to their souls' content, over values, and proportions and effects of light and shade; and what a fine day's work would have sprung from it all!

"I really think I must get him down here for a week or two," she thought. "Just to give me a fillip in the right direction."

Fired by the notion, she made one or two ineffectual dabs at the woman's draperies: then, flinging down brush and palette, sank into a deep, cushioned chair sacred to her husband, as a small table bearing ash-tray, pipes, and a pile of corrected proofs, bore witness. She glanced through them lazily, with softened eyes: then, as if drawn by a magnet, her gaze returned to the picture.

"Horrid depressing thing!" the reflected. "And yet . . how attractive!

The general character of it is rather like Eldred himself. I suppose I could produce nothing that wasn't at this stage! They are both up-hill subjects, certainly; worth tackling; and not to be mastered in a day."

But for all that she was little used to wrestling with her art. The touch of genius in her was of the spontaneous, rather than of the painstaking order; and a remembered word of Michael's rose up to disconcert her. "Succ.u.mb to your womanhood and there is an end of your Art." Irritating man! What business had he to make random shots so near to the truth. Yet it was not the whole truth; and hers was the chance to prove it.

Certainly for the past six months and more, she had succ.u.mbed unreservedly to her womanhood; had endured without a pang the temporary eclipse of her art. What need to strive after the presentation, the expression of life, when she had penetrated to the core of it: was living it buoyantly, fervently, with every faculty of heart and spirit?

By nature a being of extremes, she was apt to fling all her energies in one direction at a time: and in these last months of so-called idleness she had been mastering the rudiments of the finest and most complex of all arts,--the art of living in closest human relationship with 'a creature of equal, if of unlike frailties'; an art that must be mastered afresh, year by year: because life, as we know it, is rooted in change; and if a husband and wife are not imperceptibly growing towards one another, they are almost infallibly growing in the other direction. But for the artist woman self-surrender is no natural instinct: it is a talent to be consciously acquired, if she ever acquire it at all: and although Quita had, in some sort, been through the fire, she was still a novice in those 'profound and painless lessons of love,' that can only be taught in the incomparable school of marriage.

Meanwhile, she was learning her husband,--in his own phrase,--like a new language; and enjoying the process, despite its undeniable difficulty. For the man was by temperament inarticulate, and a solitary: propensities aggravated by six years of bitterness, and stifled pa.s.sion. Let his love be never so deep and true, the spell of isolation, the spirit that drives men into the wilderness, was as strong in him as the need to share thought and feeling with the heart nearest her own was in his wife. At no time could he have been cla.s.sed among the frankly unthinking men who slip into marriage as composedly as they slip into a new suit of clothes: and at five-and-thirty, the complete readjustment of life and habit demanded by this exquisite yet exacting bond could not be arrived at without some degree of conscious strain and compromise.

The past few weeks had revealed to both, more or less clearly, the 'sea of contrarieties' through which they were called upon to steer without capsizing; had brought them to that critical turning-point when the first rapture of pa.s.sion in possession subsides imperceptibly, into an emotion deeper and more stable; when the insignificant outer world resumes its normal proportions; and individuality rea.s.serts itself, often with disconcerting results!