The Haunting of Low Fennel Part 6

Ramsa Lal stood in an att.i.tude of keen attention, and the Major watched him with feverish anxiety, which he was wholly unable to conceal.

"Do you hear it?" he demanded--"hoofs on the path!"

Ramsa Lal shook his head.

"I hear nothing, Sahib."

"Put your ear to the ground, and listen. I tell you that I saw figures moving away below there, and I heard--hoofs, stumbling hoofs."

The man knelt down upon the ground, and, bending forward, lowered his head. Major Fayne watched him, and with growing anxiety, so that, what with this and the pallid moonlight, his face appeared ghastly.

But again Ramsa Lal stood up, shaking his head.

"Nothing, Sahib," he repeated.

Major Fayne suddenly grasped him by the shoulders, spinning him about, and dragging him forward, so that the dusky face was but inches removed from his own. He glared into the man's eyes.

"Are you lying to me?" he demanded, "are you lying?"

"I swear it is the truth: why should I lie to you, Sahib?"

"You want them----"

Major Fayne broke off abruptly and thrust the man away from him. A different expression had crept into his face, an expression in which there was something furtive. He spun around upon his heel and stepped to the tent where Moreen was. Raising the flap slightly:

"Good-night," he called, and turned away.

Ramsa Lal had gone back to the fireside; and Fayne, following a moment of hesitancy, strode with his swaggering military gait to the tent erected in the furthermost corner of the clearing. He had stooped to enter, when he hesitated, remaining there bent forward--and listening.

From the opposite side of the distant fire, Ramsa Lal, though few would have suspected the fact, was watching. Evidently enough, the leader of the little company was obsessed with his delusion that some one or something clambered up the steep path beneath. Suddenly shrugging his shoulders, he stooped yet lower, and dived into the tent.

One of the natives threw fresh fuel upon the fire, and a stream of sparks sped up through the clear air in a widening trail ever growing fainter.

There was a crackling, a murmur of voices, and then a new silence. This in turn was broken by the distant howling of dogs, and in the near stillness one might have heard the faint shrieking of the bats, who now were embarked upon their nocturnal voyagings.

A shrill, wild scream burst suddenly from the heart of the trees in the east, rose eerily upon the night, and died away. But the group about the fire moved not at all, for this dreadful screaming but marked an animal tragedy of the Burma forests. So furred things howled and screamed and moaned in the woodlands, feathered things piped and hooted around and above, and the bats, uncanny creatures of the darkness, who seem to have kinship neither with fur nor feather, chirped faintly overhead.

Once there was a distant, hollow booming like the sound of artillery, which echoed down the mountain gorges, and seemed to roll away over the lowland swamps, and die, inaudible, by the remote river-bank.

Yet no one stirred; for this mysterious gunnery is a phenomenon met with in that district, inexplicable, weird, but no novelty to one who has camped in the Shan Hills.

A second time later in the night the phantom guns boomed; and again their booming died away in the far valleys. The fire was getting low, now.

III

Moreen lay, sleepless, wide-eyed, staring up at the roof of the tent.

She had eaten, could eat, nothing, but she was consumed by a parching thirst. The sounds of the night had no terrors for her; indeed, she scarcely noticed them, for she had other and more dreadful things to think of.

Ramsa Lal had been her father's servant; him she could trust. But the others--the others were Major Fayne's. They were no more than spies upon her; guards.

What did it mean, this sudden dash from the bungalow into the hills?

It amused her husband to pretend that it was a pleasure-trip, but the equipment was not of the sort one takes upon such occasions, and one is not usually dragged from bed at midnight to embark upon such a journey.

It was additionally improbable in view of the fact that up to the moment of departure Major Fayne had not spoken to her, except in public, for six months. The dreadful, forced marches were breaking her down, and she knew that her husband was drinking heavily. What, in G.o.d's name, would be the end of it?

Weakly, she raised herself into a sitting position, groping for and lighting a candle. From the bosom of her dress she took out a letter, the last she had received from home before this mad flight. There was something in it which had frightened her at the time, but which, viewed in the light of recent events, was unspeakably horrifying.

During the long estrangement between her husband and herself she had learnt, and had paid for her knowledge with bitter tears, that there was a side to the character of Major Fayne which he had carefully concealed from her before marriage; the dark, saturnine part of her husband's character had dawned upon her suddenly. That had been the beginning of her disillusionment, the disillusionment which has come to more than one English girl during the first twelve months of married life in an Indian bungalow.

Then, perforce, the gap had widened, and six months later had become a chasm quite impa.s.sable except in the interests of social propriety.

Anglo-Indian society is notable for divorces, and poor Moreen very early in her married life fully understood the reason.

She held the letter to the dim light and read it again attentively.

Allowing a certain discount for her mother's changeless animosity towards Major Fayne, it yet remained a startling letter. Much of it consisted in f.e.c.kless condolences, characteristic but foolish; the pa.s.sage, however, which she read and re-read by the dim, flickering light was as follows:

"Mr. Harringay in his last letter begged of me to come out by the next boat to Rangoon," her mother wrote. "He has quite opened my eyes to the truth, Moreen, not in such a way as to shock me all at once, but gradually. I always distrusted Ralph Fayne and never disguised the fact from you. I knew that his previous life had been far from irreproachable, but his treatment of you surpa.s.ses even _my_ expectations. I know _all_, my poor darling! and I know something which you do not know. His father did not die in Colombo at all; he died in a madhouse! and there are two other known dipsomaniacs in Ralph Fayne's family----"

A hand reached over Moreen's shoulder and tore the letter from her.

She turned with a cry--and looked up into her husband's quivering face!

For a moment he stood over her, his left fist clenching and unclenching and his pale blue eyes gla.s.sy with anger. Then chokingly he spoke:

"So you carry one of his letters about with you?"

The veins were throbbing visibly upon his temples. Moreen clutched at the blanket but did not speak, dared not move, for if ever she had looked into the face of a madman it was at this moment when she looked into the face of Ralph Fayne.

He suddenly grabbed the candle and, holding it close to the letter, began to read. His hands were perfectly steady, showing the tremendous nerve tension under which he laboured. Then his expression changed, but nothing of the maniac glare left his eyes.

"From your mother," he said hoa.r.s.ely, "and full of two things--your wrongs, _your_ wrongs! and Jack Harringay--Jack Harringay--always Jack Harringay! d.a.m.n him!"

He put down the candle and began to tear the letter into tiny fragments, pouring forth the while a stream of coa.r.s.e, blasphemous language.

Moreen, who felt that consciousness was slipping from her, crouched there with a face deathly pale.

Fayne began to laugh softly as he threw the torn-up letter from him piece by piece.

"d.a.m.n him!" he said again. He turned the blazing eyes towards his wife.

"You lying, baby-faced hypocrite! Why don't you admit that he is----"

He stopped; the sinister laughter died upon his lips and he stood there shaking all over and with a sort of stark horror in his eyes dreadful to see.

"Why don't you?" he muttered--and looked at her almost pathetically,--"why of course you can't--no one can----"

He reeled and clutched at the tent-flap, then stumblingly made his way out.

"No one can," came back in a shaky whisper--"no one can----"

Moreen heard him staggering away, until the sound of his uncertain footsteps grew inaudible. A distant howling rose upon the night, and, nearer to the clearing, sounded a sort of tapping, not unlike that of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r. Some winged creature was fluttering over the tent.