The Great Amulet

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"To dinner at the Savoy," suggested a thick-set Major on a note of
relish. "Devilish good one they gave me there three years ago. Night
before I sailed."

Sympathetic murmurs encouraged him to enlarge on the cherished memory!
but before he had reached the _entree_--an elaborate item--Honor was
out of hearing; having crossed the room to where Lenox sat balancing a
coffee-cup on one knee, watching the faces round him with keen, kindly
eyes, and taking little active part in the proceedings. He still wore
his arm in a sling; and his teeth held the inevitable pipe, filled from
a tin of tobacco that Desmond had induced him to accept on the night of
their talk. Only three times in the past week had he succumbed to the
forbidden mixture. But the glow of satisfaction, which those who have
never resisted unto blood, complacently couple with self-conquest, was
denied him. Restlessness, lack of sleep, constant recurrence of the
concussion headache,--these had been his reward; with the result that a
rising temperature had forced him to put his name on the 'sick-list'
and take a few days off duty. But at Honor's approach his whole face
lit up. The intimacy of everyday life had drawn them very near to each
other; for Honor had all the magnetism of a woman made for tenderness;
a magnetism few men can resist, and few women condone.

"You look so tired, and aloof from it all," she said gently. "I'm
afraid the boys' nonsense and noisiness worries your head."

"Not a bit of it. It's good to see them enjoying themselves. You're a
public benefactor, Mrs Desmond."

She laughed, and blushed.

"Nonsense. It's only so nice of them to come, when one can do so
little to amuse them. Do have some more coffee."

"Thanks. It's capital stuff. Dick's very late," he added anxiously.
"I'm wondering what's come to him."

He rose, and followed her to the tea-table, where Bobby Nixon saluted
with his most expansive smile; and announced that O'Flanagan,
reinforced by refreshment, was once more 'willing to oblige.'

An assurance that the rest were unanimously willing to listen brought
the Irishman to his feet, banjo in hand; a lank, clean-shaven
individual, who secreted a well-spring of humour beneath the
tragi-comic solemnity of the born-low comedian. He was greeted with
cries of "Fire away, old Flannel Jacket!" "Phil the Fluter's Ball!"
"An' give ut in shtyle!" He gave it in style accordingly, and in a
brogue as broad as his own shoulders; the whole room spontaneously
taking up the chorus.

"Wid the toot of the flute, an' the twiddle of the fiddle,
Dancin' in the middle, like a herring on a griddle!
Up an' down, hands come round, cross into the wall--
Faith, hadn't we the gaietee . . ."

But at this point the door opened to admit Max Richardson. He was
still in uniform; and there was that in his face which checked their
hilarity, and made O'Flanagan instantly put down his banjo.

Honor went quickly towards him, holding out her hand.

"What is it?" she asked in a low tone.

"It's young Hodson. He died . . . half an hour ago."

"Not cholera?"

Dick nodded.

An inarticulate murmur went round the room; and for several seconds no
one spoke. The first white man down seemed to bring the enemy within
striking distance of each one of them.

Then Lenox came forward. "You'll excuse us, Mrs Desmond?" he said
quietly. And the two men went out, leaving a strangely silent room
behind them.

They passed through the hall into the dining-room before Lenox took the
pipe from his lips, and spoke.

"Bad business," he remarked laconically. "And, God forgive me, when he
'went sick' this morning I half thought he was malingering. Poor
chap . . . he's quit of the Frontier sooner than he thought for,
without any help from me. You were with him, I suppose, . . . at the
last?"

"Yes; for the best part of two hours," Dick answered, absently helping
himself to a cheroot. "Never saw a man take it harder. No getting him
to make a fight for it. Kept on begging me to tell him if this show
was fellow's only chance; and . . . I couldn't."

Lenox looked intently at his friend.

"That so?"

The other nodded; and there was a short silence. Richardson took up a
photograph of old Sir John Meredith, and examined it with critical
interest.

"You might have sent for Peters," Lenox said at length,

"No earthly use. He swore like a trooper when I suggested it; and I
can't blame him. Professional platitudes are not the style of physic
to ease a man when he's suffering hell's own torments in his mind and
body." He set down the picture abruptly, and swung round on his heel.
"I'll be going on now, for a tub, and a change of clothing. Idiotic of
me, no doubt; but I feel a bit off colour after all that. How about
the funeral? To-night?"

"No. First thing to-morrow. I'll arrange it with Peters before he
leaves; and get Courtenay to let me off the sick-list, if I can." Then
grasping the younger man's shoulder with rough kindliness, he added:
"Good old Dick. Pull yourself together, and come back here for dinner.
It may be my turn . . . or yours, before we're through. And if it
is . . . we don't go out like snuffed candles, remember. You may take
my word for it."

"Hope to God you're right," the other answered between his teeth, and
was gone.

Next morning, in a flaming dawn, all that remained of Tom Hodson was
consigned, with military honours, to the dust of that Frontier he had
grown to hate, because it demands so much of a man, and offers so
little in return; and every house within earshot of the cemetery
vibrated to the three parting volleys fired over the open grave.

Lenox was present at the service; and at the gun practice that followed
shortly after it. Thirty grains of phenacetin and several forbidden
pipes, had ensured him six hours' sleep, and a cooler skin; with the
result that he had successfully induced an amused medical officer to
report him 'fit for duty.' But Nature is relentless; and Lenox,
driving back from 'orderly room' through a white-hot glare, and a haze
of pungent dust, found himself speculating vaguely--as though the
question concerned some unknown entity in another world--how he was
going to drag a protesting body and brain through the rest of the day's
work.

"Got to be done somehow, though. That's flat," was his final verdict
as he passed into the twilight of the hall.

Every door in the house was shut against the furnace without; had been
shut since seven of the morning; and would so remain till after sunset.
Yet, the mercury hovered between ninety-seven and a hundred all day,
and most of the night. In India the thermometer supersedes the
barometer; and in the hot weather it becomes an obsession. There is
always a mild satisfaction in knowing exactly what one has endured.

Desmond was not yet back, and the study was empty; a friendly-looking
room, its simple haphazard furniture unified by the rich colour
harmonies of Indian carpets and curtains; while a liberal supply of
books, unusual for the country, proclaimed it the room of a soldier who
found time for study and thought.

Too weary to get out of uniform, Lenox laid aside his helmet and
accoutrements; shouted to the punkah coolie, sleeping in the verandah,
chin on chest; sorted his geographical papers, and sat down to the
table. Then he took out his pipe, eyed it thoughtfully, and flung it
aside with a curse. Each relapse resulted in a renewed access of
self-distrust; and this morning the cloud upon his spirit fell heavier
than ever, because he foresaw that if the work ahead of him were to be
pulled through, in the teeth of the grinding headaches consequent on
his fall, last night's programme must be repeated, not once, but many
times, And at that rate, what was to be the end of it? The degradation
of submitting to the drug itself? A thousand times, no. The soldier
in him sprang to arms at the mere suggestion. Like all men capable of
greatness, he believed, not in the mastery of circumstance, but in the
mastery of will. Yet, unhappily, the will, like all spiritual forces,
is ignominiously dependent on bodily conditions. Pain, sheer pitiless
pain, will have its way with the bravest of us.

The man was ill without realising it. The nerves in his head throbbed
to a devil's hornpipe of their own, and mental effort was beyond him.
In vain he contracted his heavy brows, and tried to gather up the
threads of the chapter he had been working at. Black depression
overpowered him, obliterating rational thought. The morning's service
haunted him with unnatural persistence, and the half-hour he had spent
with Dick in the dead boy's bungalow, looking through his papers--a
chaos of bills, mostly unpaid; racing notes; old programmes; and half a
dozen envelopes addressed in a girl's unformed hand. On the open
blotter, an unfinished letter to a friend in Simla had announced his
hope of a speedy exchange down country! his determination not to spend
another hot weather 'on this God-forsaken Frontier . . .'

"Poor misguided chap," Lenox mused, not without a tinge of his old
contempt. "Now if only _I_ could have gone in his place, it would have
simplified matters all round."

But he thrust away the thought as morbid and cowardly; and by way of
curative drew Quita's last letter out of his breast-pocket. The fact
of her love for him still remained a miracle incompletely realised; and
she had been right in her belief that he had yet to discover its
intensity and depth.

The great noontide silence had already fallen upon house and compound.
Outside, brazen earth and brazen sky glared at one another with
malignant intensity. Two bullocks lounged under the bananas by the
mill wheel flicking lazy tails when the flies presumed too shamelessly
upon their apathy; and crows, with beaks agape, hopped resignedly from
one burning patch of shade to another. Among the verandah roof-beams,
three grey squirrels argued, with subdued chitterings, over a kipper's
head stolen from a breakfast plate; and at intervals a piteous wailing
came from the servants' quarters, where, as all knew, Nizam Din,
kitmutgar, was beating his pretty wife, Miriam Bibi, for the third time
that week, because she had grown careless in the matter of covering her
face, since the coming of Zyarulla, whose arrogant magnificence had
created a flutter in more than one respectable household.

But Quita's letter, written in her 'garden' on a boulder, before
breakfast, had transported Lenox many hundred miles away from it all.
The cluttering of squirrels, and the cries of poor Miriam Bibi entered
his ears; but the spirit of him was back among the mountains; the scent
of warm pine-needles was is his nostrils, the spell of his wife's face
and voice upon his heart.

A sudden sense of suffocation dispelled the dream. He found himself
breathless, in a bath of perspiration. The punkah had stopped dead.
And one must have endured this trifling inconvenience to gauge the
significance of those five words.

Lenox straightened himself with an oath. "_Kencho_.[1] . . . you son
of a jackal!" he thundered; at the same time jerking the punkah frill,
an effective means of reanimating the long-suffering punkah coolie, who
has a trick of twisting the rope round his arm, that he may jerk it the
more easily in his dreams.

But Lenox's vigorous pull merely brought a great length of rope through
the wall; and his command was answered by the groans of a man in
torment. Springing up, he wrenched open the glass door; and a blast as
from a furnace struck him across the face. The coolie, a brown,
distorted mass, writhed upon the hot stones in mortal agony. At the
Sahib's approach, he struggled to his knees with a rush of incoherent
detail; while Lenox shouted for Zyarulla, and the dogcart; flung a word
of encouragement to the stricken man, and went in again for his helmet.

Till the trap appeared Lenox paced the verandah; the punkah coolie
groaned; and Zyarulla protested as openly as he dared against his Sahib
being put to personal inconvenience for a base-born--mere dust of the
earth. None the less, at the Sahib's order he gingerly helped the dust
of the earth into the trap, where Lenox put his one available arm round
the writhing body; and the _sais_, who showed small relish for the
situation, was ordered to get up and drive from behind. The which he
did; leaning over the back seat, and keeping ostentatiously clear of
the misbegotten son of a pig who had broken his midday sleep.

In this fashion they journeyed, awkwardly enough, to the temporary
cholera hospital; a handful of tents and grass huts on the outskirts of
the station. Betwixt the clutches of cramp, and the abject humility of
his kind, the coolie slithered from the seat on to the mat; and Lenox
had some ado to prevent his falling headlong from the cart. But in due
time he was handed over safely to a suave, coffee-coloured hospital
assistant, and carried shrieking into a tent crammed with sights unfit
to be told; whence he emerged, two hours later, without protest of
voice or limb, to swell the intermittent stream of fellow-corpses that
flowed from the hospital to the burning ghatt or the Mahommedal
burial-ground outside the station.

When Lenox staggered back into the hall, dizzy with headache, and
half-blinded with glare, he was met by Desmond, who, noticing a slight
lurch as he entered, took hold of his arm.

"Zyarulla told me what happened," he said, a great gentleness in his
voice. "Come on to your room, old man. Take a rousing dose of
phenacetin, and lie down till tiffin. I'll bring you a lime-squash."

"Thanks. You are a damned good sort, Desmond. The sun's touched me
up, I fancy. I shall be all right in a couple at hours."

But before two hours were out, Desmond's orderly was speeding through
the dust to the Doctor Sahib's house; and Desmond himself had gone
hurriedly to his wife's room, where she too was lying down after her
morning's duties. She rose at his coming, holding out both hands. For
she read disaster in his eyes.

"Darling, what has gone wrong?"

"It's Lenox. He's down with it. Not severe as yet. But there's no
mistaking what it is."

Her faint colour--it had grown perceptibly fainter in the past
week--left her face.

"Oh, his poor wife! We must send a wire at once."

"I've sent one already, by the orderly who went for Courtenay. Told
her she should have news every day, for the present."

"Oh, bless you, Theo! You think of everything!"

"Steady, Honor, steady," he rebuked her gently. "We've got to do a
fair share of thinking between us just now. Paul can safely stay on if
one isolates that side of the house; and Zyarulla and I can do
everything for Lenox between us. As for you, John must give you a bed
till we're through."

"But, Theo . . ."

"Be quiet!" he broke in almost roughly; adding on a changed note: "For
once in a way, my dearest, you will obey orders without question--or go
altogether. Now give me the chlorodyne, and let me get back to poor
Lenox. Seems brutal to give him any form of opium after all he's been
through. Hullo, there's Richardson shouting outside. He'll be
terribly cut up when he knows."

It transpired that Richardson had come over, post-haste, to report
three cases among his men; and at sun-down the little mountain battery,
with its three subalterns and full camp equipment, marched out into the
open desert, scornfully overlooked by that Pisgah height of the
Frontier, the Takti Suliman, whose square-cut crags were printed in
sharp outline upon a stainless sky.

[1] Pull.

CHAPTER XX.

"Passion has but one cry, one only;--Oh to touch thee, my beloved!"
--Olive Schreiner.

Asiatic cholera is as capricious as a woman; capricious both as to her
choice of victims, and as to the grisly fashion of her wooing. In one
mood she will kill at a stroke, like a poisoned arrow; in another she
will play with a tortured body as a cat plays with a mouse. And it was
thus that she dealt with Eldred Lenox.

For two days and nights Desmond and the Pathan wrestled against the
evil thing, and against that deadly apathy as to the result, which
kills more surely than the disease itself. And since the regiment
claimed many hours of the Englishman's day, the brunt of the nursing
devolved upon Zyarulla, who scorned suggestions of sleep, and appeared
to live on pellets of opium, and a hookah, which inhabited the verandah
outside his master's room.

There were moments when they were tempted to despair. But they fought
on doggedly, and without comment; and as the second night wore towards
morning, they knew that they had conquered. The gong at the police
station down the road had just clanged three times. Every door and
window-slit stood open at their widest; and through them entered in the
familiar, unforgettable smell of the Indian Empire under her yearly
baptism of fire; a smell of dust, and baked brick work, and stale
native tobacco. A hand-lamp on the mantelpiece diffused a yellow
twilight through the room; a twilight flavoured with kerosine: and
across the twilight the shadow of the punkah flitted, like a whispering
ghost.

Zyarulla, crouching at the bedside, slid a cautious knotted hand
between the buttons of the sleeping-coat, and laid it lightly on his
master's heart. The flutter within was feeble, but regular; though the
face, grey and shrunken almost past recognition, still bore the impress
of death.

"God is great," the Pathan muttered into his beard. "The strength of
the Heaven-born is as that of mine own hills; and my Sahib will live.
It is enough."

On the farther side of the bed, Desmond, in gauze vest, and belted
trousers, mopped his forehead, and drew a long breath. Then, measuring
out a tablespoonful of raw-meat soup, he slipped a hand under the dark
head on the pillow.

"Lenox, dear chap, drink this, will you?" he said, speaking as
persuasively as a mother to a child.

Lenox obeyed automatically. For a mere instant his lids lifted, and
recognition gleamed in the eyes that seemed to have retreated half-way
into his head. Then, with an incoherent murmur, he settled himself
into a more natural attitude of rest; and the two men watching him
intently, exchanged a nod of satisfaction.

The Pathan, sitting back on his heels, fumbled at his belt for a pellet
of opium.

"He will sleep now, Huzoor, like a day-old babe; and the Presence will
sleep also. Since yesterday at this time your Honour hath taken no
rest; and there be three hours yet to parade-time."

"Good. We have fought a tough fight, thou and I, and be sure Lenox
Sahib will know of thy share in it. Wake me at half-past five."

"Huzoor."

Zyarulla salaamed profoundly; and Desmond, dropping with fatigue, flung
himself, even as he was, on to a chair-bed in the adjoining
dressing-room, and slept the dreamless sleep of exhaustion.

Before six he was over at Meredith's bungalow, sitting on the edge of
his wife's bed, drinking tea with an egg in it,--her own
prescription,--and enjoying her delight at his news.

"Good enough, isn't it?" he concluded heartily. "I'll take the
telegraph office on my way back."

"And _I'll_ come over to breakfast, bag and baggage!"

"Capital. If John agrees."

"Of course he will. He's not such a fidget as you are!"

"Glad to hear it; if it means getting you back; and both rooms shall be
disinfected to-day, Lord, but it's a weight off my mind!"

And he cantered down to the Lines in such a mood of exaltation as they
know who have been privileged to fight for a human life, and win.

Honor got her own way, as she always did; and half-past nine found her
back at her deserted post behind the teapot. Desmond fancied that she
looked paler than usual; that her cheerfulness was veiled by a shadow
of constraint. But as Paul was present, enjoying his first normal
breakfast, he contented himself with scrutinising her, when her
attention seemed to be taken up elsewhere. As a matter of fact, Honor
knew precisely how often he looked at her; and, womanlike, hugged his
solicitude to her heart. For there had been moments, in the past two
days, when the traitorous thought would obtrude itself that perhaps the
child needed her most after all.

Directly the meal was over, she rose, murmuring that she had 'things to
see to,' and went out, leaving the men with their cigars. But instead
of going to the store cupboard, where the old Khansamah awaited her,
armed with his daily _hissab_,[1] she slipped into the drawing-room,
sat down at her bureau, and leaned her head on her hand; honestly
hoping that Theo might leave the house without coming to her. For all
that, the sound of his elastic step brought a light into her eyes. She
did not rise, or look round; and he came and stood beside her.

"Not quite yourself this morning, old lady?" he asked. "Anything
really wrong? Fever? Headache?"

She caught the note of anxiety, and with a quick turn of her head
kissed the fingers resting on her shoulder.

"No, darling, neither. Don't worry yourself. I'm perfectly well."

"Sure?"

"Quite sure."

"Good." And he departed, whistling softly; clear sign that all was
well with his world.

But twenty minutes later when Paul came in to look for a strayed pipe,
he found Honor, quite oblivious of 'things,' crying quietly behind her
hands. He retreated hastily; but she heard him and looked up.

"Don't go, Paul. I want you."

No three words in the language could have pierced him with so keen a
thrust of happiness.

"Do you mean . . . can I help you?" he asked eagerly. "I felt sure
something was wrong."

"Did you? I'm a bad actress! But . . it's about Baby,--the other
Paul," she added, smiling through wet lashes. "I have just had a
letter from Mrs Rivers that makes me want to pack my boxes and go
straight back to Dalhousie."

"And shall you? Is it serious enough for that?"

"Oh, how _can_ one tell?" she cried desperately, her voice breaking on
the words. "It mightn't seem serious to you. He has fever, and a
touch of dysentery, and terrible fits of crying with his double teeth.
Mrs Rivers seems anxious; and of course one thinks . . . of
convulsions. It all sounds rather a molehill, doesn't it, after the
horrors we have been living in here? And perhaps only a mother would
make a mountain out of it. But I think mothers must have God's leave
to be foolish . . . sometimes!"

Fresh tears welled up, and she hid her face again. Paul could only
wait beside her tongue-tied, half-sitting on the edge of the
writing-table, wondering what dear, unfathomable impulse had led her to
admit him to the sanctuary of her sorrow; realising, so far as a
masculine brain can realise, something of the struggle involved in
woman's twofold responsibility--to the man, and to the gift of the man.

It is the eternally old, eternally new tragedy of Anglo-Indian
marriage; none the less poignant because it is repeated _ad infinitum_.
Love him as she may, it costs more for a wife, and still more for a
mother, to stand loyally by her husband in India than the sheltered
women of England can conceive. For to read of such contingencies in
print, is by no means the same thing as having one's heart of flesh
pierced by the sword of division.

"Has Theo heard all this?" Paul hazarded gently. "He went off in such
good spirits."

She dried her eyes, and looked up,

"I couldn't spoil it all by telling him. But I thought it might seem
less of a nightmare, if I could tell some one . . . and . . ."

"And I happened to come handy?" he suggested with a rather pathetic
smile.

"Oh, Paul, how horrid! It wasn't that," she contradicted him hotly.
"It was because you are . . you, my boy's godfather, and my very dear
friend. Do you suppose I would have shown my mother-foolishness to any
other man of my acquaintance?"

"No. I don't suppose it," he answered, looking steadily down into the
anxious beauty of her face. "Forgive my much less pardonable
foolishness, and let me help you, if that's possible. Are you really
thinking of going?"

"N . . no. I don't believe I am. Only . . for one mad moment, I felt
as if _nothing_ could hold me back. But children are such elastic
creatures; and if I arrived to find him quite frisky and well, think
how ashamed I should feel at having deserted Theo, and put him to so
much expense for nothing. But I do want to wire at once; though I
hardly like sending Theo's orderly . . ."

"Let me write it for you, and send my man," he volunteered, catching
gratefully at something definite to be done; and taking up a form he
prepared to write at her dictation.

"Reply prepaid, please; and addressed to Frank. I shall go straight
over there, and stay till I get the answer, I could never keep it up
with Theo all day. You saw how badly I did it at breakfast!--What's
that? Some one come?"

Sounds of arrival were followed by an unmistakable Irish voice in the
hall; and Honor hurriedly dabbed her eyes.

"Dear Frank, how clever of her! She can drive me over."

A minute later she was in the room; an angular workmanlike figure, in
sun helmet, and the unvarying coat and skirt. It was her one idea of a
dress,--drill in summer, tweed in winter. "An' be all that's sensible,
what more should an ugly woman want?" had been her challenge to a
misguided friend, who had suggested higher aspirations. "'Tis no
manner o' use to dress up a collection of limbs and features without
symmetry; an' it saves no end of mental wear and tear, to say nothing
of rupees, that's badly wanted for polo ponies."

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