The Great Amulet

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"Does that help you to realise it a little better, . . . my wife?" he
whispered; and for answer she drew in a long breath that was almost a
sob. He released her at once; and as she faced him, flushed and
breathless, he saw that tears stood in her eyes.

"Why, . . . why did you never . . . kiss me . . . like that before?"
she asked very low.

"God knows I have wanted to, a hundred times," he answered. "But I
think I was afraid you might . . . hate it. Why do you ask, though?
Would it have made any difference between us if I had?"

"I can't tell; . . . oh, I can't tell! Only . . . you have been so
restrained, so unlike an . . . ordinary lover, that I never dreamed it
could mean as much to you . . . as all that . . ." She pulled herself
together with an effort. "Now I am going to take off my things," she
said. "Don't come, please. I want to get away by myself."

A moment later he stood alone, between the sunlight and the firelight,
gazing blankly at the door that hid her from view; and wondering
whether he had advanced or retarded matters by his unpremeditated flash
of self-revelation.

II.

"A turn, and we stand in the heart of things."
--Browning.

When Eldred Lenox sailed from India six months earlier, he would have
scouted as impossible the suggestion that he might bring a wife back
with him on his return: and his uncompromising avoidance of women, from
boyhood upward, had seemed to justify him in his assurance. But Nature
is inexorable. She has her own methods of accomplishing those things
that are necessary to a man's salvation; and behold in three months the
impossible had come to pass. The giant Mirabeau was right:--"_ce bete
de mot_" ought by now to be struck out of our dictionaries.

Lenox knew little of half measures: and, having succumbed,--in spite of
himself, in spite of inherent prejudices and convictions,--he succumbed
heart and soul. That which he had unduly scorned, he now unduly
exalted. Only Time and the woman could lead him into the Middle Way,
which is the way of truth. For beneath the surface hardness of the
Scot lurked the fire, the imaginative force, the proud sensitiveness of
the Celt: a heritage from his Cornish mother, whose untimely death had
left her two younger sons in the hands of a bachelor uncle, of red-hot
Calvinistic views. Their father--a man of an altogether different
stamp--had met his boys on rare occasions, and ardently desired to know
more of them: but an Afghan knife had ended his career before he could
find leisure to complete their acquaintance. The history of
Anglo-India is one long chronicle of such minor tragedies.

Thus fire-eating Jock Lenox had exercised iron rule over his charges,
unhampered by parental interference: had reared them in an
unquestioning fear of God, and an unquestioning distrust of more than
half His creatures; had impressed upon them, in season and out of
season, that woman was the one fatal element in a man's life, the
author of nine-tenths of its tragedy, complexity, and crime.

Yet "one touch of Nature" had annulled, in three months, the work of
twenty years. So much for education!

For a while Lenox stood motionless where his wife had left him, as
though life itself were suspended until her return: for despite the
glory of autumn sunshine, of leaping flames upon the hearth, the room,
robbed of her presence, seemed colourless, dead.

Then, as the minutes passed and she did not reappear, restlessness took
possession of him; sure sign that he was very deeply moved. He crossed
to the open window, but even the colossal calm of the mountains failed
to quell the tumult of passion in his veins. Her last words left him
anxious. There could be no peace till he had interpreted them to his
full satisfaction; and the power of interpreting a woman's words could
not be reckoned among his attributes.

Suddenly it occurred to him that he had pocketed two unopened envelopes
before starting for church. He drew them out; rather because he needed
some definite occupation, than because he felt curious as to their
contents. Men of his type are rarely overburdened with correspondents.

The first was a business letter. He read it with scant attention, and
returned it to his breast-pocket. The second envelope bore the
handwriting of his senior subaltern, now in England on short leave.
The two men were close friends; but Eldred's last letter had been
written four months ago; and the envelope in his hand contained
Richardson's tardy response. He broke the seal with a smile at thought
of his subaltern's astonishment when he should learn the truth. The
letter was longer than usual; and in glancing through it hurriedly, the
name Miss Maurice caught his eye. "Great Scott!" he muttered aloud;
then, with quickened interest, began upon the second page, ignoring the
opening.

"Wonder if you have run across the Maurices in Zermatt," wrote Max
Richardson, with no faintest prevision of the circumstances in which
the thoughtless lines would be read by his friend. "Artists both of
them, brother and sister; and a rather remarkable couple, I'm told.
She seems to have made a hit at the Academy; and the cousins I'm
staying with are very keen about her. I happened to mention that I was
writing to a chap in Zermatt, and they begged me to ask if you had
heard or seen anything of this Miss Maurice. There's a bit of a
romance about her; that's what has pricked their interest. Seems she
was engaged to Sir Roger Bennet this season. A swell in the Art patron
line. Lost his heart at first sight. But evidently on closer
acquaintance found her rather a handful, and too much of a Bohemian to
suit his British taste! At all events there was a flare-up over
something about three months ago, and Sir Roger backed out, politely
but definitely. It seems that Miss Maurice was a good deal cut up.
Went off to Zermatt with her brother. And now rumour has it that she
is engaged, if not married, to some other chap out there, I suppose by
way of a gentle intimation to Sir Roger that he hasn't broken her
heart. My cousins are eaten up with curiosity to know if it's true.
Women appear to be capable of that sort of thing. But it strikes a
mere man as playing rather low down on a luckless devil who has done
her no harm: and I don't envy him his hasty bargain, or the repenting
at leisure that's bound to follow. Lord, what fools we men are! And
how easily we lose our heads over a woman! All except you--the Great
Invulnerable, looking down upon our folly from the superior height of a
snow-peak. . . ."

Lenox read no further. The last words enraged him, like a blow between
the eyes, and set the blood hammering in his temples. It would seem,
at times, that Fate selects with fiendish nicety the psychological
moment when her arrows will strike deepest, and stick fastest. Thus,
when his thirst was at its height, Lenox found the cup dashed from his
lips; and that by the hand of his best friend:--a master-stroke of
Olympian comedy.

With a curse he flung the letter on to the table.

Wounded love, wounded pride, and baulked desire so clashed in him that
clear thought was impossible. He only knew that he had been
deliberately deceived, the most intolerable knowledge to a man
incapable of deceit: and with the knowledge all the natural savage in
him sprang to life. If Richardson had appeared before him in the
flesh, it is doubtful whether he could have stayed his hand: the more
so, since he believed that the man had written the truth: that this
girl--whom it seemed that he had wooed with quite unnecessary
reverence--had taken the best he could give, and utilised it as a mere
salve for her wounded vanity.

He understood now why her heart had proved more difficult of access
than her hand. He had believed it unawakened; had dreamed, as lovers
will, of warming it into life with the fire of his own great love: and
lo, he found himself forestalled by this execrable man in England.
Clearly he had been a fool;--an infatuated fool! He stabbed himself
with the epithet: and a vivid memory of his uncle's stock cynicisms
turned the knife in the wound. All the prejudices and tenets of his
youth rushed back upon him now: an avenging host, mocking at his
discomfiture; narrowing his judgment; blinding him to the woman's point
of view.

And while he still stood battling with himself in a vain effort to
regain his shaken self-control, the bedroom door opened, and his wife
came quickly towards him.

His changed aspect arrested her: and the sight of her facing him thus,
with the sunlight in her eyes and on her hair, her young purity of
outline emphasised by the simplicity of her dress, so stirred his
senses, that, in defiance of pride, the whole heart of him went out to
her, claiming her for his own. But it is at just such crises that
habit reveals itself as the hand of steel in a silken glove; and before
she could open her lips, Jock Lenox had stretched out a ghostly arm
from his grave in Aberdeen, and shut to the door of his nephew's heart.

Quita glanced hurriedly from the discarded letter to her husband's face.

"My dear, . . . what has gone wrong? You look terrible. Have you had
bad news?"

The irony of the question brought a smile to his lips.

"Yes. I have had bad news. Read it for yourself." And he pushed the
letter towards her.

"Why? Who is it from?"

"A friend of mine, in England, who seems to know a good deal more about
you than I do."

"What on earth do you mean?" she asked sharply.

"You know well enough what I mean. Read that letter if your memory
needs refreshing."

Her first instinct was indignant refusal. Then curiosity conquered.
Besides, she wanted above all things to gain time: and while she read,
her husband watched her keenly, with God knows what of forlorn hope at
his heart.

But a twisted truth is more formidable than a lie; and intuition warned
Quita that Lenox was in no mood to appreciate the fine shades of
distinction between the literal facts and Max Richardson's free
translation of the same. His frankly masculine comments fired her
cheeks; and at the sight Lenox could restrain himself no longer.

"By Heaven! You care for that fellow still!" he broke out hotly. "And
you had the effrontery to take those solemn words on your lips this
morning, with the love of . . . another man in your heart!"

Quita Lenox, whatever her failings, lacked neither spirit nor courage.
She threw back her head, and faced his anger bravely.

"How dare you say such things to me? I . . . don't care for him. I--I
hate him!"

"Proof conclusive. Indifference kills hatred. No doubt you wanted to
convince yourself, and him, that you were indifferent; and to that end
you must needs crucify the first man who comes handy. An admirable
sample of feminine justice!"

"Eldred, . . . you have no right to speak like that. I won't hear you."

"I have every right; and you shall hear me. It was one thing to know
that you could not give me all I wanted at the start. One hoped to set
that right, in time. But to accept me because another man's defection
had piqued your vanity, . . . God knows how you could dare to do it!
I see now why you found me unlike an ordinary lover. No doubt that
other fellow--curse him--took full advantage of his privileged
position: while to me you seemed a thing so sacred that I hardly dared
lay a hand on you. I might have known that a man who is fool enough to
put a woman on a pedestal, is bound to pay a long price for his folly."

He was lashing himself more mercilessly than he lashed her: and in the
torment of his spirit he did not pause to consider the possible effect
of his words on a recklessly impulsive woman.

"Really . . . you are insufferable!" she retorted, her breath coming
short and quick. "I have a little pride also; and you had better stop
before you push me too far. For I tell you frankly, I don't care
enough for you to stand this sort of treatment at your hands."

The counter-stroke stung like a lash. The lines about his mouth
hardened, and he straightened himself sharply.

"Pity you were not more frank with me twenty-four hours ago. Then we
might both have been spared this morning's ironical service. However,
the thing is done now. . . ."

"Indeed, it's not done!" she flashed out defiantly. "I have no notion
of being your wife on sufferance, I assure you. We are only on the
threshold as yet. We need not go a step farther unless we choose. And
after what you have said to me, . . . I do not choose."

For an instant the man was stunned into silence; then, in a desperate
impulse, took a step towards her.

"Quita, . . . you don't realise what you are saying? Nothing can alter
the fact that we are man and wife, now and always."

She motioned him from her with an imperious gesture.

"Don't touch me, please. I do realise, perfectly, that we are not free
to make any more dangerous experiments. But we are at least free to
live and work independently of one another. Of course I know that you
can compel me to remain with you,"--her colour deepened on the
words.--"But I know also that you have too much chivalry, too much
pride, to force yourself upon me against my wish."

"By God, yes!" he answered from between his teeth. "And . . . what is
your wish, may I ask?"

For the first time she hesitated, and lowered her eyes.

"I believe our wishes are identical," she said.

"No need to trouble about mine. You can put them out of court
altogether."

His tone spurred her to instant decision.

"My wish is to go back to Zermatt at once, by the funicular; and . . .
that we should not see one another again. I will accept nothing from
you. I can earn my own living, as I have done till now. Thank God,
Michael is too blessedly Bohemian to make a fuss, or be horrified at
things. He will simply be overjoyed to get me back."

She turned from him hastily; and he stood, like a man paralysed,
watching her go. On the threshold of the bedroom door she looked back.

"Don't think of writing to me, or of trying to patch up a
reconciliation between us," she said on a softened note. "Mended
things are never reliable. I can neither forget nor forgive what you
have said to me to-day, and when you have had time to think things
over, you will probably feel thankful that I had the courage to leave
you."

The soft closing of the door roused him, and he sprang forward with her
name on his lips. Then Pride gripped him; Pride, and the habit of
self-mastery hammered into him by his redoubtable uncle. The fact that
our spirits thus live and work, deathlessly, in the lives and hearts of
those with whom we have come into contact, is a form of immortality too
seldom recognised by man.

In the silence that followed, Lenox looked blankly round the empty
room:--the room where they should have spent their first evening
together. Then the irony, the finality of it all, overwhelmed him, and
he sank upon the nearest chair. "What have I done? . . . My God, what
have I done?" he breathed aloud. And it is characteristic of the man
that, for all his grinding sense of injury, he blamed himself more
bitterly than he blamed his wife.

His eye fell on the letter, which, had it contained a bombshell, could
scarce have wrought more damage in so short a space of time. Tearing
it across and across, he flung it into the fire, and derived a gloomy
satisfaction from watching it burn. But though paper and ink were
reduced to ashes, neither fire nor steel could annihilate the winged
words, thoughtlessly penned, that had altered the course of two lives.

Footsteps in the bedroom brought Lenox again to his feet.

He flung the door open, expecting--he knew what.

An apathetic hotel porter was removing Quita's trunk: and nothing that
had been said or done in the last half-hour had hurt him so keenly as
this insignificant item:--the touch of commonplace that levels all
things.

With a gesture he indicated his own portmanteau. "Take that also," he
said, and strode out of the room.

At least he had the right to shield her from comment. To all
appearance they must leave the place together! and he settled his
account with the smiling manageress, adding simply: "Madame has had bad
news."

He took a later train down the hill; deposited his trunk in a hotel
bedroom; and spent his wedding-night under the stars; walking,
ceaselessly, aimlessly, to deaden the ache at his heart.

Next morning he despatched half a dozen lines to Richardson disowning
all knowledge of Miss Maurice's concerns: and three weeks later he
sailed from Brindisi without seeing his wife again.

BOOK I.--AFTER FIVE YEARS.

CHAPTER I.

"I, who am Love, burn with too fierce a fire,
Even if I only pass and touch the soul,
Life is not long enough to heal the wound.
I pass, but my touch for ever leaves its mark.
I, who am Love, burn with too fierce a fire."
--Turkish Song.

Max Richardson lifted the "chick," paused on the threshold, and
surveyed the empty room.

A bachelor's room, in a frontier bungalow, boasts little of beauty,
less of luxury. The legend of Anglo-India--"Here to-day, and gone
to-morrow"--is visible on its nail-disfigured walls, battered camp
chairs and tables, supplemented by chance purchases from the "effects"
of brother officers, retired, or untimely hurried out of "the day, and
the dust, and the ecstasy."

To the observer for whom one hint of human revelation outweighs in
value a warehouseful of inexpressive furniture, a room of this type
holds one superlative interest. It is an index of character no less
infallible than its owner's face. Its salient features may tell the
same tale as a dozen others in the same station--the tale of a soldier
going to and fro in a land of unrest. But its minor details reveal the
man beneath the uniform.

There is as much individuality after all in a soldier as in any other
specimen of God's handiwork; even though tradition and the War Office
compel him to an external suggestion of having been turned out by the
dozen.

The ramshackle room whereon Eldred Lenox had set his seal differed in
one notable respect from others of its type. It contained no picture
either of a woman or a horse. The dingy white wall was relieved by
groups of barbarous weapons--Thibetan daggers, a pair of wicked-looking
kookries, the jezail and Brown Bess of Border tribesmen, and the
murderous Afghan knife, whose triangular two-foot blade has disfigured
too many British uniforms.

In peaceful contrast to these trophies were one or two rough sketches
of the mountain regions beyond Kashmir; desolate stretches of glacier
and moraine, or groups of stately peaks, the colouring washed in with a
singular sureness of touch. There were also maps, finely executed by
hand, of Thibet and Central Asia. To these fresh names and markings
were added, from time to time, with a thrill of satisfaction only to be
gauged by the man for whom the waste places of earth are a goodly
heritage, and who would sooner contribute a new name to the world's
atlas than rule a kingdom. Higher up the twenty-foot walls, heads of
sambhur, markor, and the lesser deer of the Himalayas showed dimly in
the light of one lowered lamp. Skins of bear and leopard, and one or
two costly Persian prayer-rugs, partially hid the groundwork of dusty
matting, taken over with the bungalow from its former occupant, and in
places revealing the stone floor beneath. The broad mantel-shelf was
given over to books, a motley crowd in divers stages of dilapidation.
'The Master of Ballantrae' shouldered 'The Queen's Regulations,' one
would fancy with a swaggering hint of scorn; a battered copy of the
'Pilgrim's Progress' stood resignedly between Bogle's 'Mission to
Thibet' and a technical handbook on Topography, the whole row being
propped into position at one end by a great brown tobacco-jar, and at
the other by a bronze image of the Buddha in cross-legged meditation--a
memento of Lenox's latest expedition to Thibet.

The solitary lamp, its green shade set at a rakish angle, stood upon a
spacious writing-table, strewn with closely written sheets of foolscap,
pens, pencils, pipes, and books of reference, half a dozen of these
last being piled on the floor, close to the writer's chair. It was the
table of a man who leaves his work reluctantly, leaves it in such a
fashion that he can take it up again exactly where he left off, without
wasting precious time upon preliminaries.

On Lenox's bare deck-lounge a bull terrier, of powerful build and
uncompromising ugliness, slept soundly, nose to tail, and on one of the
costly prayer-rugs his Pathan bearer slept also. The deep, even
breathing of dog and man formed a murmurous duet in the twilight
stillness.

All these things Max Richardson noted, with a twinkle of amusement in
his blue eyes. Every detail of the room spoke to him eloquently of the
man he had not seen for a year. Since his departure on furlough the
battery had changed stations, marching across sixty miles of sand
desert from Bunnoo to Dera Ishmael Khan, familiarly known as "Dera
Dismal," a straggling station a few miles beyond the Indus.

Richardson had arrived from Bombay late that evening, just in time to
change and hurry across to the station mess. To his surprise Lenox had
not put in an appearance at the mess table, and Richardson,
anticipating fever,--the curse of frontier life,--had left early,
inquired the way to his Commandant's bungalow, and now stood on the
threshold, scarcely able to believe the evidence of his senses.
Strange developments must have taken place during his absence, if
Lenox--the woman-hater, the confirmed recluse--were actually dining out.

He approached the snoring Pathan and roused him, not ungently, with the
toe of his boot. The native sprang up, fumbled at his disarranged
turban, salaamed deeply, and finally stood upright, a splendid figure
of a man, six feet of him, if his peaked turban were taken into
account--hard, wiry, with aquiline features, grey beard, and eyes keen
as a sword-thrust; a man without knowledge of fear, cunning and
implacable in hatred, but staunchly devoted to the Englishman he
served, who, in his eyes, was the first of living men.

"The Captain Sahib--where is he?" Richardson demanded in the vernacular.

"At Desmond Sahib's bungalow for dinner. By eleven o'clock he
returneth. Your Honour will await his coming?"

"Decidedly."

Zyarulla turned up the lamp, and proceeded to set whisky, soda-water,
and a tumbler among his master's scattered papers. Brutus, at the
sound of a remembered voice, tapped the cane chair vigorously with his
stump of a tail, without offering to relinquish the one comfortable
seat in the room. Richardson sat down beside him, caressed the strong
ugly head, and lit a cigar.

The Pathan withdrew, leaving him alone with the dog and the whisky
bottle, from which he helped himself liberally. Then, drawing one of
the closely written sheets of paper towards him, he fell to reading it
with interest and attention. It was a minute geographical record of a
recent journey through tracts of mountain country hitherto unexplored,
a journey which had gained Lenox the letters C.I.E. after his name.
Richardson, while failing to emulate the older man's zeal for
wanderings that cut him off for months together from intercourse with
his kind, was yet keenly interested in their practical outcome.

The stronger light in which he now sat revealed him as a big fair man,
by no means ill-featured, his soldierly figure emphasised by the gunner
mess-dress of those days, with its high scarlet waistcoat and profusion
of round gilt buttons, in each of which twin flames winked and
sparkled. A suggestion of kindly, uncritical contentment with things
in general pervaded his face and bearing. The blue eyes were rarely
serious for long together; the mouth, under a neatly trimmed moustache,
showed no harsh lines, no traces of past conflict. Had the great
Overseer of men's destinies not seen fit to guide him to the Frontier,
out of reach of demoralising influences, it is doubtful whether he
would have escaped the trail of the petticoat, the snare of the
grass-widow in determined search of amusement. As it was, he had
passed through the critical twenties with a clean defaulter sheet; had
established himself as a good soldier and a good comrade, a
"friend-making, everywhere friend-finding soul," and the closest among
these was the Commandant of his battery--a wholesome and pleasant state
of things for both.

He was beginning to weary of geographical detail, when steps sounded in
the verandah, and he was on his feet as Lenox came in.

"Hullo, Dick! Good man to wait for me! Thought I should have seen you
before mess, though. What do you mean by not coming here straight?"

"None of my fault, old chap. We were delayed as usual crossing that
blamed old Indus. Stuck on a sandbank for over an hour. Gives a
fellow time to count up his sins and renounce the devil, eh? Expected
to find you at mess, of course. I wasn't prepared for this sort of
upheaval in the natural order of things!"

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