The Mercy of the Lord Part 10

"You could use the handsome goatherd as a model, you know," remarked Jim Forrester, vaguely surprised at his own irritation; "your father said his features were Scythic."

"Yes!" a.s.sented the numismatist, abstractedly, as he tried to re-read part of the offending missive by the distant light of the lamp; "rather an uncommon type in India, nowadays, though one sees it elsewhere.

Queenie has it partly--your mother had Russian blood in her, you know."

"Perhaps that is why I feel so interested in Khesroo," said the girl, looking coldly askance at her lover.

"Oh, by the way," put in her father, breaking in on his own indignation and the silence which ensued between those two who loved each other--a silence which both felt to be at once incomprehensible yet inevitable, intolerable yet in a way rascinating--"that reminds me. The orderlies reported he was bad with fever to-night. Send him over some more quinine."

"I'll take it, if you like," said Jim Forrester, faintly penitent.

She looked at the two men with disdainful tolerance. "I will see him first. One never knows what these people call fever--it may be pneumonia."

She moved off as she spoke, into the night, meaning to cross over towards the orderlies' tent, then paused to glance back at the figure--which followed. "Are you coming, too?" she said, curtly. "I can manage all right."

"Of course I am coming!" replied Jim Forrester. "It is pitch dark, to begin with, and I can at least help you to find your patient. I think you had better keep outside the camp, so as to avoid the tent-ropes--it isn't any longer, really."

It was, if anything, shorter, but it brought them instantly into the grip, as it were, of the desert, which crept hungrily upon the camp on all sides; so that, ere they had gone five steps beyond the canvas wings of the tent, they seemed as much alone, as far from conventional twentieth-century life, as they had been two days before, when they first sat together as betrothed lovers in the sunset of a world of curves telling the tale of eternal, of unseen circlings. Even so much of Life's secret was invisible now. All they saw was a darkness they knew to be wilderness, a dim outline of themselves, close together, hand in hand. For with the knowledge that they were alone--perhaps with the memory of the wilderness--they had clasped hands instinctively, and for the time the sense of stress and strain had pa.s.sed.

It returned again, however, with curious vividness, as, right in their path, a shadow, dim as their own, showed suddenly.

She knew who it was instinctively before it spoke.

"I thought you had fever," she said. "Why are you here?"

"I have been waiting the graciousness of the queen-lady," came the reply, and the voice was buoyant with joyous vitality. "I have to tell her my dreams--the fever always brings dreams, and I remember now! Yea!

I remember all things from the beginning. So, if she will come, I will show her the lost city where we lived, and she will dream the dream also."

Dimly, in the darkness, she fancied she could see the shining of his eyes, see his beckoning hand. What her lover saw was a movement of the shadow towards the wilderness: what he felt was a faint increase in the distance between his hand and hers which made him claim it again.

"Queenie!" he cried, "what are you thinking of? You can't possibly go now. The man is delirious with fever--surely you hear that in his voice. You had better come back to the tent and let me send someone to take him into shelter and look after him."

For an instant no one spoke, and then it seemed almost a bodiless voice from the desert which broke the silence, for in his desire to detain her, Jim Forrester had drawn the girl back a pace or two, so that the darkness lay deeper between their two shadows and that third one nearer the wilderness.

"Let the queen-lady decide for herself. If she comes, I will show her all forgotten things--the golden crown that is not plaited hair, the golden coin that was made for the lovers----"

"Jim," she whispered, almost fiercely, "do you hear? It is the gold coin--it is waiting to be found. I must go----"

"This is pure folly," protested the young Englishman. "If anyone has to go, I will, of course. But what hurry is there? Why not wait till to-morrow--now, do be reasonable, Queenie, and consider----"

She ceased trying to release her hand, and when she spoke again it was in a natural tone.

"Yes. I forgot that. Khesroo, I will come with you to-morrow. It will be easier by daylight. Go back to the orderlies' tent now, and I will send you over some more medicine, and when the fever has gone----"

"The dreams will have gone, too," came the voice out of the night; but it, also, was more natural, more like that of Khesroo the goatherd. "I shall forget again, and then the gold coin that was struck for her and her lover----"

"For her and her lover," echoed the girl, softly. "Did you hear, Jim? I must go and get it for you."

"Long--long ago----" came the voice again.

She echoed the words almost inaudibly this time, and Jim Forrester drew her closer as he said sharply: "If anyone goes, I will; but I don't see----"

The voice interrupted him. "But the queen-lady sees. She is like her mother; she sees pictures in the sun. Of course, the Huzoor can come; but if the queen-lady really wants this thing--if she believes--if she trusts----"

"Let me go, Jim! let me go!"

"You shall not," he cried, seizing her round the waist in swift antagonism to some unseen influence, in sudden consciousness of conflict.

And so to both him and her in the darkness and stillness of the desert, within a few steps only of quiet, comfortable, commonplace civilisation, came like a whirlwind a perfect tumult of bewildering emotions, and all the deathless forces which never slumber or sleep in their work of moulding the soul of man, leapt from silence into speech.

Love, jealousy, hatred, resolve, high courage--all these seemed to sweep through their every fibre of mind and body, leaving them breathless, wondering, uncertain if they were awake or dreaming, if they were real or mere shadows of a reality which Time cannot touch or alter. For an instant only they were conscious of all this--but the instant might have been an hour in its suggestion of infinite experience.

Then Time claimed them once more, time and trivialities and commonsense, so that ten minutes afterwards, Jim Forrester, having made his preparations for a tramp into the desert, was stooping to say good-night to his betrothed and to a.s.sure her of his speedy return. The moon would rise in half-an-hour, the distance to the place where they had first met Khesroo could not be over three miles, he would be back by midnight.

Meanwhile, she could tell her father he had turned in, but if she chose herself to sit up--well ...

As their lips met lingeringly, a little breeze that had wandered from the desert shifted a ripple or two on the sand-waves about their feet, and died away like a sigh in the fine fret of the kikar trees above the unseen tents.

IV

It was an hour before dawn.

The desert itself could scarcely have been stiller than the camp. In the white moonlight the white tents looked like some shrouded city of the dead, forgotten yet unburied; for, here and there, some out in the moonlit open, other flecked with the fine shadow of the kikar trees, lay corpse-like figures swathed in sheets, as if waiting for their graves. There was no sound, no sign of life, not even where the moonlight, slanting through the still, wide-set wings of the drawing-room tent, showed the folds of a woman's dress, the daintiness of a high-heeled shoe.

The rest of the figure was in shadow, though the light, in its last effort against the darkness of the tent, claimed the pages of the open book which lay on the sleeping girl's lap, and turned one of them into a silver framing for the photograph of a child. So vivid was the light that even the fine feminine writing beneath it showed in the dead woman's verdict:

"_The Son of a King!_"

For the girl had been pondering over the strange chance which had brought her, in her turn, within the influence of this nameless kingship when, as she waited for her lover's return, she had fallen asleep in her chair. And yet, as she had sat there, thinking, watching, she had felt very wide awake indeed. Not with anxiety, however; that had pa.s.sed. In fact, as she followed in her mind what had gone before Jim Forrester's quite prosaic start to walk three or four miles into the wilderness on a moonlight night to be shown the bearings of a buried city and possibly to be given proof positive that there were ruins beneath the sand, she had been in grave doubt as to what had actually occurred. Had there been conflict? Had love and jealousy and hatred and resolve risen up and claimed them all? Surely not. Why, indeed, should it be so? Though, doubtless, in her, in her lover, in the goatherd, there was something held, as it were, in common, yet which had struggled to be individual, separate.

And this had been most marked between the young Englishman and the goatherd. Unaccountable as it was, she felt that in some mysterious fundamental mind of hers these two were a.s.sociated indissolubly--that they stood towards her on the same plane. Nay, more! that it was the consciousness of this which kept her calm, which overbore the possibility of future danger, the memory of past conflict. What harm could happen to the Son of a King or with the Son of a King?

The phrase had been on her lips as she fell asleep. It was on them as she awoke and stood up suddenly, the open book sliding soundless from her lap into the soft sand. But the phrase brought no comfort with it now. Had she been asleep for long! Had her lover returned? Was it past midnight?

The anxious questions surged up through the crust of calm before she was half awake, and instinctively she was outside the tent in a moment on her way towards her lover's, her rapid feet, shod in the dainty high-heeled slippers, dimpling the shifting sand.

The coming dawn had sent cloud heralds to the west, and an advanced pursuivant, drifting across the moon, shadowed all things faintly and seemed to increase the silence.

She called softly; there was no reply, so she looked in. A glance told her that her lover had not returned, and the light stealing in through the uplifted screen showed her by the travelling-clock hung to the tent-pole that it was already past three o'clock.

Three! What had happened--and what was to be done? For an instant the ordinary inrush of anxiety made her think of rousing the camp, of sending out search-parties; but the next brought her a curious conviction that in this case danger lay in seeking outside help: a certainty that in this matter she must stand alone, that in this crisis--whatever it was--there must be but three alone--if, indeed, there were three--herself, her lover, and this nameless Son of a King.

So, almost without a pause, the dimples left by her rapid feet were curving towards the highest sand-wave within sight of the camp. Thence she could watch the desert sea, and perhaps find him, even now, close at hand. But once there, the next sand-wave attracted her as being a better point of vantage, and so from wave to wave she flitted in her white dress like some desert bird, leaving behind her a curved track of dimples in the sliding sand, until a little wind, the herald blast of the hurrying clouds overhead, crept low down over the world and swept the dimples back into the old ripples.

"Khesroo!" she called, suddenly, for a shadow seemed beside hers in that empty wilderness; but there was no answer.

"Jim!" she called again, uncertainly; but there was no reply. Yet she was not frightened. She knew now, in that mysterious fundamental mind of hers, that she alone was responsible, that she, and she only, could solve the riddle. Khesroo had been right. If she wanted this thing, if she had believed, if she had trusted, she would have gone before. And now she must hurry, or it would be too late--wherefore or for what she scarcely considered.