The Siege of Sar

I

"Have you heard, Captain Terrington?" cried the girl gaily. "There's to be a Durbar after all! So you were wrong. It's to be in the Palace too, that you were so set against, and Lewis and Mr. Langford are going with Sir Colvin, and just the littlest guard of honour for the look of the thing. Sir Colvin says the great thing with these sort of people is to show you're not afraid, and I'm perfectly certain he's right."

She sat upon the table, all in white; her hat slung upon her arm, her feet swinging to and fro amid the muslin fulness of her skirt, pointing her remarks with the tips of their gilded slippers.

The man who had just entered the bungalow in khaki riding kit stood a straight six feet. His face, strong and silent, was as brown as his jacket, and his spare figure had an air of tempered energy. The only break in its entire brownness was the faded strip of ribands on his left breast. At the sight of Mrs. Chantry he had checked the stride with which he entered, lifted his helmet, and pushed back from his forehead its damp brown lock of hair.

As he stood staring at her with a frown, she set her wrists on the edge of the table, and rocked her body gently in time with her feet.

"Well!" she exclaimed with a laugh as he stopped before her; "what did I tell you? I said if you'd only leave Sar for a week I'd get the Durbar, and I've got it in three days!"

She ceased her swinging, and looked up at him with an excited triumph in her eyes. "Well?" she repeated provocatively, leaning back and putting the tip of a tiny tongue between her lips.

He drew a wicker chair from the wall and threw himself into it with a sigh.

"I only hope it isn't true," he said.

She leaned forward over the table, gripping its edge, her face thrust out, like a figure on a ship's prow.

"Honest Injun!" she cried, sparkling. "Every word. Durbar to-morrow. Khan's guard and tom-toms round at eleven, and off we march at noon. Oh! don't you wish you were going?"

"Not at all," he said drily. "I've never wished to die like a trapped mouse."

She drew herself up resentfully.

"How dare you say that," she cried; "when you know Lewis will be there!"

"All right," he said, too tired to argue; "I'll try to see its good points. How did this happen?"

She was a flouting pouting bird again at once.

"I did it," she declared.

"Oh, did you," he replied without conviction. "When?"

"The moment you started foraging. You're the only man in Sar who doesn't care a da—— a fig for what I think, so I had to wait till you were gone. The others!"

She gave a shrug to her pretty shoulders.

"Well?" enquired Terrington.

"Well, a woman's only got to let a man see she thinks he's afraid of anything to put him at it. I let 'em all see," she said, smiling.

He looked at her hard.

"You think I couldn't?" she challenged.

"I've never thought of anything you couldn't," he said simply.

She looked at him, laughing softly. Then, raising herself on her wrists, poised her dainty figure above the table, letting it swing between her arms, while she met with the fluttering twist of a smile the intent displeasure in his eyes.

"What did you do it for?" he asked.

She pushed herself back along the polished table till her knees and knuckles were side by side.

"What does a woman ever do anything for?" she retorted, leaning over her perch with her elbows upon her knees. "To show she can," she added, as he offered no solution. "I was going to let you see you weren't the king of Sar."

"Good God," he groaned in weary bewilderment. "Where's Sir Colvin?"

She shook her head slowly, smiling, from side to side.

"Don' know, don' know, don' know!" she babbled. "What did you get?"

He took no notice of the question.

"And your husband?" he said.

"Lewis is with Sir Colvin. May be anywhere. Probably messing up my room. They're preparing for the Durbar," she drawled with soft malice.

His preoccupation paid no heed to it; and she went on:

"It's wonderful the hours we do things at here. Just decent breakfast-time and we've had half a day. When did your Majesty breakfast?" she asked.

"Some time yesterday," he said indifferently. "Has Gale written?"

But she was on her feet at once.

"Oh, I say!" she cried. "How horrid of you not to tell me!"

The tatties on the anteroom entrance had closed behind her, like reeds behind a snowy pheasant, ere she finished speaking, and Terrington could hear the "Kitmatgar, O Kitmatgar!" of her lifted childish voice ring along the empty mess-room.

II

As Rose Chantry left the room the light went out of Terrington's face, and an irresistible lassitude crept like a gray smoke across it. He had been for three days in the saddle, with but a couple of his own guides, in a country cut by torrents from precipitous stone, among a silent and lurking people who were only waiting the word to murder him, and for the last day and night he had been living on food snatched from a holster as he rode.

There was no one in Sar to whom he could delegate the duty; no one acquainted as he with the country and the people; no one who knew so intimately their private avarices and animosities; no one who could utilize their tribal treacheries and pretensions, to extract from them the grain they had a mind to keep. They had known him five years before, while Sar was as yet unembroiled of its neighbours, and still admitted British influence and rupees, when his shooting feats had won him the nickname by which everywhere he was known, and the friendship of the men who were waiting now, without breach of friendliness, to put an end to him.

It was on account of this intimate acquaintance that he had been selected to command the escort which accompanied Sir Colvin Aire, whose mission was to settle finally the standing of a resident, and of road repair and protection between Sar and the frontier.

Such simple questions hung however like dewdrops on the web of a wide and hostile political influence. Their disappearance would only be of importance as a signal that the meshes had been cut.

Lewis Chantry had watched the network spreading during the six months he had served as political officer at Sar.

He had smiled at it with a soldier's easy optimism, until he tripped one day upon a strand that was being woven between him and home.

The Indian Government, palsied by a political change of control, and a demand for immediate cheapness however costly, answered his urgent appeals with vague precepts of compromise and Sir Colvin Aire.

Sir Colvin was not cheap, but, from possessing no previous acquaintance with the question, and being the most easily available and palpably the wrong person, he had, at any rate, an air of cheapness.

He was a big genial man, with no sense of his own importance, and a fixed belief in bluffness. He had shewn Terrington his instructions, some six weeks earlier, on the night his escort joined him, and the two were sitting smoking after dinner outside the tent—the stillness of the evening only broken by the cry of a jackal or the scream of an owl—looking up at the black mountain wall that blotted out the northern stars, over which they were to climb on the morrow to an unknown fate.

"You see, they say I'm to make the fullest use of your knowledge of the country," concluded Sir Colvin, as Terrington replaced the lantern by which he had been reading, and lay back in his chair.

"I see," he replied quietly; "but they were careful to make no use of it themselves."

"You're not in love with the trip?" asked the other.

"Oh, yes, sir, I'm charmed with it," said the younger man; "but I'm sorry for the chaps that will have to fetch us back."

"What do you mean?" asked his chief slowly.

Terrington stretched out his hand into the soft night air.

"It's summer here, sir," he said with seeming irrelevance, "and summer at Simla; summer for three full months. It's summer at Sar too; but in four weeks there will be snow on the passes, on the Palári and Darai; and, in six, whoever goes out of Sar that way," and he nodded towards India, "goes because he must."

"You think we may have to winter there?" asked Sir Colvin.

"I took a liberal view of the time we might spend there, sir, and asked at Sampur for five hundred spare rounds a man."

"Cartridges!" exclaimed the Commissioner.

"Yes, sir. Colonel Davis thought they might come in useful, and let me have what they had. Then there was a Maxim they were doubtful about——-"

"My good man!" broke in the other; "do you take this for an expeditionary force?"

"No, sir," replied the soldier. "I knew we were an escort, so I packed the Maxim on a mule. There's a corner in the old fort at Sar, I remembered, that it would look well in: and I thought, if we had to spend the winter there, we might make the place as cosy as we could. I meant to tell you, sir, as I had to requisition some extra transport, and I scheduled the lot as 'gifts for the Khan.'"

"Well, I must say you're a cool hand!" gasped his chief.

"I thought we'd be sure to let him have them if he came for them," explained Terrington simply; "so it read all right. I wasn't quite clear if a Maxim could be included under necessary equipment!"

"Oh, you weren't, weren't you," exclaimed the other. "And how do you think I'm to explain it?"

"Wouldn't it come under my knowledge of the country of which you were to make the fullest use, sir?" was the innocent reply.

Sir Colvin laughed, and the talk turned on what he held to be the peaceable possibilities of Sar. On that subject Terrington could hold nothing but his tongue. He was an adept at minding his own business, but he tried on the way up country to illuminate his chief's views of the men with whom he had to deal, by tales of Sari humour, which were mostly pointed by the decapitation or disembowelment of the humorist's best friend.

At Sar the Mission found everything in silver paper. It was met imposingly at the Gate of the Great Evil, ten miles below the city, where the river tears a way through rocks of black basalt, and had eaten there the salted cake of a sacred hospitality.

It was welcomed into Sar by the bellowings of an unspeakable music, and for three days the bearers of gifts and good wishes wore a path through the Bazar between the Residency and the New Palace.

Chantry reported a pleasing change in the Khan's bearing since the Mission had been appointed, his affability, attention to protests and anxiety for the comfort of the new comers.

Out of this very consideration arose the first note of discord, owing, as Chantry put it under his breath, to Terrington's "damned pigheadedness."

His own guard of Sikhs, Dogras and Bakót levies had been housed in the Old Palace, now called the Fort, a low mud and stone building, whose brown walls of astounding thickness rose hard upon the green tangle of chenar in which the Residency stood. The little force fitted it as scantily as a wizened kernel fits its shell, and, although the river washed the Fort's eastern face and secured that from assault, was too scant to hold it. The addition of the odd two hundred of the Commissioner's escort made defence quite another matter.

The Khan knew that, and with many apologies for the lack of accommodation in the Fort, cleared out his own barracks on the other side of the river, and put them with immense affability and the stores they contained at Chantry's disposal for the escort's occupation.

Chantry, unable ever to credit any one with less than his own share of honour, accepted gratefully on the Commissioner's behalf, glad to be relieved from a further cleansing of the Fort and from the pressing difficulty of provisions.

He explained the arrangement to Sir Colvin, as the Guides swung out of the brown mob of Saris, past the guard of honour into the Residency compound, and formed front with their own undauntable swagger before Rose Chantry's smiling eyes.

Aire listened attentively, with his eye on the frail figure in heliotrope on the verandah.

"Sounds all that's desirable," he said; "but I'm not the one to settle it. There's your man," he nodded, as Terrington rode up to report.

Terrington's hard stare swept the city as the proposal was repeated, a grim smile darkening his mouth.

"Very considerate of the old gentleman," he said slowly; "but I think we'll stay here."

Chantry exploded with difficulties. The Fort wasn't habitable; he couldn't face the question of supply; the Khan would be insulted; the difficulty of negotiations increased. He turned to Sir Colvin imploringly, but the Commissioner shook his head.

"Delegation of authority," he purred. "Mine's political!"

"But what am I to tell the Khan?" cried Chantry in expostulation. "Am I to say that you're afraid?"

Terrington's stare had included absently the other's face.

"Tell the old fox," he said, "that I'm delighted to have a political officer to make my explanations. Last time we met I had, as he'll remember, to make them myself."

He asked Sir Colvin's permission to fall the men out for dinner, and rode back without a further word about the Fort. He was unused in the matter of orders either to ask or answer questions.

Chantry made a despairing but fruitless appeal to the Commissioner, who replied that, having entrusted Terrington with absolute discretion in the military affairs of the Mission, he could not interfere.

"Good man," he concluded; "dam good man! Can talk through my Pukhtu, and cooks like a chef. You'll get used to him, if you stand in with him. But he'd clear out the devil if he got in his way."

Sir Colvin had learnt something from the daring fashion in which Terrington had held up the various Khels, ill-affected most of them, but all blandly amiable, from which the Mission had accepted hospitality on the road to Sar.

He had fixed each, as he approached it, in a grip of steel; covered its avenues, commanded its towers, as if about to exterminate a nest of hornets; but he had entered with an air of unconcerned good-fellowship, as though the rifles ranged without to avenge him and the naked steel at his elbow had no real existence.

"What's about the risk in these places?" Sir Colvin had asked on quitting one of the most forbidding.

"Never can tell," replied Terrington with a shrug. "Treachery with these chaps is like a hiccup. It often comes as a surprise, even to the man who has it."

"And don't they rather resent your precautions?"

"Oh, not a bit! they admire them. It's part of the style of a gentleman hereabouts to distrust your neighbour so explicitly that he daren't misbehave. Prevents costly mistakes. The etiquette is to show him you can murder him, and then to credit him genially with too much sense to put you to the trouble."

The etiquette was complicated, as Terrington admitted, by the lasting advantages which infidel slaughter offers to one of the True Faith, very tempting to starving and houseless hill-men, with veins fired by a seductive Paradise.

But etiquette, though worn once or twice a trifle thin, saw them safe into Sar, where Sir Colvin recognized in Terrington's insulting suspicions of his host the policy which had proved so curiously effective throughout their journey.

Its observed success made him accept more readily the difficulties entailed, especially since Terrington seemed to expect no assistance in removing them.

He set to work upon the Fort with the Bakót levies on the afternoon of his arrival, and began at the same time to organize a system of supply. He was at his desk, or directing alterations in the Fort until a late hour of the evening, eating his dinner with one hand and working with the other, so that he did not meet Rose Chantry till chota hazri next day.

A wing of the Residency had been turned into mess and ante-rooms, and furnished the Commissioner with quarters. Clones, the doctor, found lodging in another part of it, while Terrington, Walcot and Dore, his immediate subordinates, and Langford, who commanded the Sikh and Dogra detachments, made shift in an adjoining bungalow, and the native officers were sheltered by the Fort.

It was still early when Terrington, already half through his morning's work, entered the mess-room; but only Mrs. Chantry remained beside the urn. She wore a brown canvas habit, a hard straw hat, with the colours, scarlet and sage, of her husband's regiment. She looked to him absurdly young and pretty for a woman in such a place; and he was provoked by the folly which permitted her to arrive there. She was trying to look disdainfully indifferent. She was proud of being the one Englishwoman in that utmost post of the Empire, and this man alone had appeared absolutely unconscious of her presence.

"I suppose you're Captain Terrington," she said, turning towards him from the table; "as I was introduced yesterday to all the others?"

"Yes," he smiled, "I'm Nevile Terrington: and it needs no supposing to give a name to you."

"Really?" she said, reseating herself. "I shouldn't have imagined you were aware of my existence."

"All too well!" he sighed, smiling. "There is nothing I would have sooner missed in Sar."

She snapped back the tap of the samovar, and faced him in a pretty little blaze of petulance across the open teapot.

"You would turn me out now if you could, I dare say," she cried.

"This very hour," he assured her, his smile unruffled. "But I can't. 'Rien ne va plus,' as they say at another game. Do you know what that means?"

"At Monte Carlo?"

"No! in Sar? It means winter, I'm afraid."

"Winter!" she exclaimed, her resentment embarrassed by the man's imperturbable temper, and her interest provoked by his voice. "I'm going down with Sir Colvin."

"Yes!" he said. "And when will that be?"

"When he's done here."

"Yes!" he said again, "but that hardly puts a date to it. I can give you one for the snow."

"Look here!" she cried—and the little imperious words, with their little imperious manner, made suddenly a bond of battle between them—"you haven't been here a day, and you've set every one foaming. Do you know that?"

"Yes," he said humbly. "I'm afraid I've put my foot into it all round."

"Well!" she exclaimed. "Do you want me against you too?"

He shook his head gravely.

"Heaven forbid!" he said. "But you're against me already."

She rose, lifted her riding-whip from the table and took her skirt in her hand.

"Yes, I am!" she said.

She moved towards the verandah, visible through the carved screen of wood that filled a part of the wall: stopping before a quaint Cashmiri mirror that hung upon it to set her hat straight and tie her veil.

Terrington's eyes followed her as he stirred his tea.

"Where do you ride?" he asked, as she went towards the door.

She turned in the entrance, facing him, against the crimson folds of the purdah.

"Everywhere," she said.

"You'll have to give it up," he announced tranquilly.

She stood an instant longer, her lithe brown figure framed in the curtains' crimson and gold, to let him realize the defiance under her lowered eyelids and the scorn of her little lifted chin. Then she pushed back the purdah and stepped out into the sun.

III

Whatever regret may have sounded in Terrington's admission, he did nothing to mitigate the inconvenience of the boot he had thrust into Sar.

He reorganized the service of spies which had been of such use to him five years before; but the difficulties in picking up the threads, which had then been complacent to his fingers, taught him more than was told by those on which he could lay his hands.

The rise in the price of treachery, and the trivial details it could profess to furnish, warned him not only of the nearness and wide-spread intimation of an outbreak, but of a native confidence in its success. He had sufficient belief in the extractive qualities of a bribe to expect a few days' notice of the final explosion, when a knowledge of the plot should have reached the more servile of his informants. Meanwhile he could only listen to its developments in the dark.

On the surface there was no sign of trouble, save the difficulty of obtaining audience of the Khan, and his disinclination, when cornered, to talk treaties. There was much futile arrangement and re-arrangement of durbar; Mir Khan refusing to discuss politics anywhere but in the Palace, and Terrington being equally determined to provide them with quite another carpet.

Meanwhile the most amiable appearances were preserved, and polo was played three days a week on the ground beyond the Fort.

Within that gloomy building alterations of a significant kind were in progress, but the only visible addition was a dado in art paper round some of the walls.

The paper had been appropriated, from the medley of gifts collected for the Khan by some humorist at headquarters, by Terrington, who said he had a more pressing use for it.

Chantry, when he discovered that all the pressing was to be done on the mud walls of the Fort, objected petulantly to this curtailment of his stock of presents, which the Khan's policy of postponements had almost exhausted.

Terrington replied drily that the paper was marked 'sanitary,' and that the condition of the Fort when handed over to him was the reverse of that: hence his use of it.

He did not point out further that a stick drawn along the dado in a certain direction would have revealed a series of gaps in the mud work behind it; and that if the point of the stick were used vigorously to sound such gaps a lightly mortared stone would have fallen outwards from each of them, and the Fort become a better ventilated and loop-holed building.

Concealment was so essential to the undertaking that only Sir Colvin, Afzul Singh, Terrington's trusted Subadar, and the sappers who did the work were in the secret. Other noises had to be contrived to cover the daily perforations, and only in darkness could the final drilling of the walls be done: the outmost portion being replaced and the dado extended before dawn.

Sir Colvin did not appreciate these preparations; but he could not condemn them. They meant a winter's defence of Sar Fort against overwhelming odds, and that was not a pretty thing to contemplate.

An uglier one, however, was to face those odds unprepared, and be himself responsible for the improvidence.

So his consent was given, as an insurance on his reputation, but he wished that Terrington's prevision had been more accommodating or less acute.

So far, however, as the Commissioner was forced to admit, they had been justified by results. Nothing had come of the Mission, and nothing seemed to be on its way. More than a month had gone by in Sar, and though the sun still filled its sheltered valley with a summer heat, snow had fallen on the eastern passes; and, visibly from the hills about it, the everlasting whiteness of the northern peaks was spreading in frozen silence towards the plain.

Terrington had watched that whiteness, knowing what it meant, and, half ashamed of himself, hoping what it meant.

It was for the falling of that icy portcullis, he felt, that Sar was waiting: waiting till it closed across their chance of escape, across their hope of rescue.

Then the gathering conspiracy would burst: burst, as it supposed, on unprepared defenders; and the end would rest with him. It would be a siege, whatever its outcome, as great as any that had lived in story, and the man who saw it through would need no further fame.

He was a cavalryman; but this was his ideal of combat: a fight which should test every quality of manhood; a struggle through months of despairing vigilance with unconquerable hordes.

Yet though he saw in such a siege the rare chance of a lifetime, a chance for which his life had waited, he tried with an astounding probity to make it impossible.

"I believe," he told Sir Colvin on the question of secret fortification, "I believe that we can hold Sar Fort for at least ten weeks, if my plans are carried out; but, if I may say it to you, sir, I think we have no business to try."

Asked his reason, he expressed the conviction that the game of military glory in Sar wasn't worth the candle of men's lives which would be burnt in an attempt to relieve it in mid-winter.

"Your word, then, is go?" asked the Commissioner.

"Yes, sir. Make the immediate discussion of the treaty the condition of your remaining, and let the Khan realize how his refusal will be understood.

This place can be wiped out cheaply enough next summer; but if our chaps have to slam up here through the snow they'll lose two men for every one they save."

"And how are we to go?" asked the other.

"Oh; by the Palári," replied the soldier. it "By the Palári!" exclaimed Sir Colvin. "Why the snow's over it already."

"Yes, sir; but Gale is at this end of it in Rashát. What's to happen to him if we creep out by the south?"

But the Commissioner shook his head, to Terrington's intense relief. That last argument clinched his decision. The Government which put him into the pickle must take him out of it. He was not going to fight his way home with three hundred men through the snows of the Palári and between the desolate precipices of Maristan, where once in ancient days an army had melted like the spring water upon its courses. So Terrington returned to his loopholes, and Sir Colvin to that merry little messroom in the shade of the chenar where all the trifling rites of home were observed with such an exacting deference, and the chances of the morrow debated with a boy's disdain. The dinner table, however, could show a feature which would have been unusual elsewhere, since a woman sat in its seat of honour.

When Mrs. Chantry had made over her two best rooms for the use of the Mission, its members had elected her to the presidency of their mess, and despite the charming shyness with which she took the chair she had converted it at once into a throne.

Most of her subjects would have welcomed the wildest folly on her behalf, and not one would have missed without dismay the light whiteness of her presence in the breakfast-room, or the lithe figure with its girlish shoulders which rose every evening from the square black chair at the head of the table and lifted a glass above its golden head to pledge their memories to their Queen. It is possible that, as they touched glasses against the one her white arm held across the cloth, they vowed a more immediate homage than the toast proclaimed; but then a soldier's homage has often so many vicarious shades.

Of Terrington Mrs. Chantry saw far less than of the rest. He made no occasions to meet her, and never offered himself as an escort for the rides which he had not yet proscribed. She saw him at polo—and he was worth seeing at polo—at dinner, and occasionally in the morning, when she was in time to pour out his tea.

For the remainder of the day he was buried in the Fort. But she learnt, chiefly through her husband, the part his counsel played in Sir Colvin's decisions, especially when that was, as mostly, in direct disagreement with Lewis Chantry's mind.

Of that mind his wife had never taken a too imposing measure, but she espoused it now even when obviously at fault.

She used it to provide causes for a quarrel with Nevile Terrington, and she despised it for starting her almost always in the wrong.

She would have been puzzled, perhaps, to give a reason for her enmity, and might have said that it dated from the moment she had seen him. But it had really an earlier origin—the moment when she expected, and did not see him; and it was kept alive by his absolute indifference to her beauty and her opinion.

Her supreme object was to show herself stronger than he, to thwart his plans, to make him repent having dared to ignore her.

For he would not take her seriously enough to explain his intentions. He treated her as a child; as though there were a world of things that could not be put into speech for her. He was for ever filling up spaces, where the matter was beyond her with the asterisks of a smile.

But while he was in Sar her efforts were of no avail.

Terrington could detect her secret influence in the sayings of all the men about her, even in Sir Colvin's tentative suggestions; but beyond creating a dull hostility to his plans and policy she could do nothing.

She tried to draw from him at mess some declaration that would irritate the others, but Terrington, though apparently indifferent to their irritations, only laughed at her attempts.

It was when, by a sudden intermission in the supplies on which he had counted for provisioning the Fort, Terrington was obliged to leave Sar in order to put personal persuasion on his agents in the country round, that Rose Chantry saw her chance, and took it.

The decision she could most effect was, she saw instantly, that of the Durbar.

Every one was chafing under the restrictions which Terrington had imposed; every one was anxious to have the crisis over, and the future settled one way or another. Aire's urgent representations had been shelved by a harassed Viceroy in the fatuous hope of something turning up to save expense and excuse his vacillations.

The eastern passes were already under snow, the southern would be white with it in a fortnight longer. If a winter in Sar were to be avoided something must be done at once, and, since no one but Terrington anticipated hostilities, a winter in Sar was the last thing they wished.

Rose Chantry found, in consequence, ground sown ready to her hand: and she fed it with a fertilizer which is always effective—a woman's smile at man's unvalorous hesitations.

In this case, probably, it only precipitated the harvest; but precipitation was essential.

On the third day of Terrington's absence the Durbar was proclaimed.

IV

The Durbar had been announced only a few hours previous to Terrington's return, but Rose Chantry had had the news of it from her husband on the previous evening.

Consequently, when Nevile, so long before he was expected, entered the ante-room, she was quite at home with her triumph and only surprised by the chance of thrusting it into his face.

When, half ashamed of having harried such a hungry man, she had flown into the mess-room to find food for him, Terrington sat staring at the white chunam walls, softly aglow with the sunlight that blazed outside. A window in one of them framed a space of blue sky, the greenness of a chenar, and, squatted on the ground beneath it, Rose Chantry's ayah, swinging a glass bead tied to the lowest bough. He was too tired to think of the news he had heard, or to keep his thoughts from following the woman who had told it. He realized with a numb surprise how many memories of her remained in the queer glimmer of that empty room. How much he remembered which he thought to have forgotten, and which, he was not too tired to tell himself, he ought to have forgotten.

Whichever way he looked he could see her figure in one of its airy poses, coquettishly sweet or coquettishly defiant; smiling, pouting, mocking, or fancifully grave. The other figures in those groups, men all of them, had faded; hers remained. A white spirit that filled the place for him.

He shut his eyes to shut it out; but found the likeness was on the other side of his lids.

He lifted them quickly at a laugh from the mess-room doorway through which Rose Chantry was leaning, with a tatty in either hand pressed against her shoulders and her golden head in the gap.

"Didn't mean to wake you," she said, smiling, "but there's some cold chikor. Will that do?"

"Nothing better," he replied.

"Well, you'd better have it where you are," she announced with a glance across her shoulder; "they're hanging a new ceiling cloth in here, and there's no end of a litter."

As her head withdrew with a shrill call to the kitmatgah, Sir Colvin and Chantry entered from the verandah.

The Commissioner, with the sense of nakedness which men have felt so often since the days of Eve from following a woman's counsel, wished, on learning of Terrington's arrival, to confront him personally with the news of the Durbar. So after he had seated himself and listened to what could be told him on the prospects of supply, he put the question with an exaggerated imitation of his own bluffness.

"Well! I suppose you've heard of the Durbar?"

"I'm afraid, sir," said the other, "I've been too hungry to hear of anything but breakfast. It's to be cold chikor," he added, smiling, as Rose Chantry, followed by the kitmatgah, made a muslin whiteness in the mess room-door.

She heard the cheerful lie with a flash of admiration for the man who spoke it.

So many beaten men, she knew, would have jumped at the peevish chance to hit back, especially when the hard truth to hit with was in their hands.

"Well," continued Sir Colvin, saluting Mrs. Chantry and reseating himself, as the tray was laid before Terrington, "I decided, as no reply came to my last demand, some sort of move must be made at once, if we weren't to be boxed here all the winter. So, as there was no chance of ferreting the Khan out of that hole of his, we're going to talk him into reason over there."

Terrington, with his knife in the partridge, looked up and nodded.

"I suppose the plan's no more to your mind than ever?" queried the Commissioner.

"No, sir," said his military adviser. "I think it's even less."

"How! from what you've heard?" exclaimed Sir Colvin.

"No," said the soldier slowly; "from what I haven't heard. There's no talk in the hills; and when a Sari man's dumb, he's either got something to say, or something not to say it."

"Hang it all!" cried Chantry. "I wonder if there's anything that you wouldn't think a bad sign?"

Aire shrugged his shoulders.

"Well! the die's cast," he said; "and we've got to see the thing through. The only question left is one of escort. We want to look imposing but not belligerent. What do you think?"

"The smaller the better," said Terrington drily.

"Why?"

"You can't take enough to make it safe for you," explained the other; "but you can take enough to make it unsafe for us."

"For you?" Sir Colvin asked.

"Suppose you don't come back?" was Terrington's reply.

"Gad! but you're a cheerful counsellor," cried Chantry hotly.

"If they murder us, eh," said Aire.

"And you think they mean to, Captain Terrington?" asked Rose Chantry.

Terrington shook his head.

"Not to-morrow!" he said. "Mir Khan wouldn't expect to get the chance."

"You mean he doesn't believe we're such unqualified fools as to go there?" Sir Colvin suggested.

"That's probably how he puts it," said Terrington blandly.

"Well that gives us a chance the more," Chantry threw in.

"A chance the less, I think," said Terrington. "Blood is always a Sari man's first thought, and he'll leave no time for a second."

The agent's dark eyes glowered with a whole-souled malediction, but Sir Colvin, tapping on the table, watched in silence for some seconds while Terrington finished his meal.

"Do you still try to dissuade me?" he asked at length.

"Not at all, sir," replied the other. "I was only thinking of the escort. If they mean murder over there they'll mean it the more the more of you there are."

"Why?"

"Supposing they intend to go for us, they'll wait till all the passes are closed, and we're cut off. In that case they'll hardly give away their game now, unless they get a chance to cripple us."

"Twenty men would be enough?"

"Ample," said Terrington. "And I'd keep as many of them outside as possible."

"Yes; and you might pick some of your own men for the job."

Terrington's face hardened. His men were his children, and he hated to let them run a risk which he could not share.

"In that case I'd ask the honour of going with you, sir," he said.

Sir Colvin shook his head.

"No, no!" he answered. "The Fort is your business, and it may prove a big one. Chantry is going in with me, and Langford, who's an old cavalryman, will take the escort. I've sent down word of what I'm doing, but I'll leave a fuller account with you, in case anything goes wrong." He turned with Chantry to leave the room, calling back from the doorway: "By the way, the polo's to come off to-morrow afternoon as we arranged. You're playing, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir," replied the other, watching the two figures pass out of the verandah, and seem to shrink as they were immersed in the fierce yellow of the sun.

Then he turned, and met Rose Chantry's eyes.

She had flung herself into a long chair: her knees were crossed; her head thrown back; her hands clasped behind it. To Terrington's vision the tip of her toe, her knee and her chin were in a line; and the absurd little sole of her shoe, with its elfin instep and the arch curl of its heel, made a print on his memory in which it was afterwards to tread.

"Well!" she said, with her tantalizing smile, "was the chikor good?"

"Excellent," he answered.

Her lips fluttered like the wings of a bird.

"Didn't it taste of defeat?" she suggested, the dark lids drooping over her eyes.

"No," he said gravely, "it tasted extremely game."

She swept him with her covert glances, but his had fallen to her foot.

"Why did you tell that lie?" she asked presently.

He looked up into her face for an instant.

"I've forgotten," he said.

"Sir Colvin wouldn't have suspected me," she added. "He knows no more about a woman than ... than you do.

"I suppose that leaves him without much knowledge to boast of?" he reflected.

"Yes," she said; "it does."

She tilted her head sideways to see, beyond her knee, on what his eyes were fixed. She tossed her foot clear of the muslin flounces, and then with a curious twist of the ankle brought it round into her view.

"What's wrong with it?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"How should I know?" he said thoughtfully. "It wasn't made for me."

She laughed, slowly twirling her foot, as though fascinated by its suppleness, or by the gleaming creases of the silk that covered it. Then, with a little jerk of her knee, she let it settle again into the froth of flounces.

"Really," she said, "for a man who says so little, you do say the strangest things."

His eyes had wandered again to the square of open air, the picture in azure and ochre and emerald which the window made in the wall. The brown woman still sat swinging her bead in the shade of the chenar. Terrington could see its glassy blueness as it dipped to and fro across a splinter of sunlight.

Rose Chantry, with her eyes on his profile, asked him at what he was looking.

He told her.

"I know!" she exclaimed. "Why is she always doing that?"

"She wants a child," he said.

"But she has one."

"Another then."

She gave a shudder.

"What strange things women are!" she cried.

His eyes came round to her, and she felt a coldness in them like the green gleam of ice.

"Out here, you see," he said quietly, "women are still as fond of making men as of making fools of them."

"Why do you say that?" she asked sharply.

"I could think of nothing better," he replied.

"Why did you say it to me?" she persisted.

"To whom else could I have said it?" he enquired blandly.

The blaze of anger seemed to fill her eyes with a floating sparkle of fresh colours, and her lips closed tightly, as though to repress a desire to bite him. Then she met his glance and laughed.

"I wonder why you dislike me so," she said.

"I don't dislike you," he replied.

"Oh, well!" she sighed, "why don't you dislike me, then; since you seem too? You wish I wasn't here!"

"Very much," he admitted.

"Why? What harm do I do?"

"Haven't you told me that this morning?"

"No!" she cried. "You weren't thinking of that; you know you weren't. You believe that would have happened anyhow. It was what you meant about making fools of men."

"Well," he said, "don't you make fools of them?"

She shook her head softly.

"My mistake then," he said.

"Ah!" she sighed, "but you don't think so. I daresay you think something much more horrid of me than you care to say. And it ought to have been rather nice for you all, having me up here."

"Yes," he said, "I think it ought."

She looked at him doubtfully, crumpling her lips together in her fingers.

"But you do make mistakes," she went on retrospectively.

"Yes," he said, "one makes everything of them."

She regarded him for a moment in the light of the remark, before adding:

"You told me, the first time you saw me, I must give up riding."

"Yes," he admitted, smiling; "that was one of them. But I found that your riding could be of use to us."

"Of use to you?" she exclaimed.

"Yes, in creating a false impression."

"An impression of what?"

"Of security: that we did not think you were in any danger."

"Though you thought I was?"

"I was sure of it," he said.

She was sitting upright now; her hands set upon the chair-arms; her face changing stormily between anger and astonishment.

"You were sure I was in danger, yet you did nothing to prevent it!" she cried. "Do you mean that?"

"What should I have done?" he enquired.

"Warned me!" she said

"But didn't I?"

"Oh, that!" she exclaimed impatiently.

"And would you have been warned?"

"I don't know. I can't say. That's got nothing to do with it. Or you could have given me an escort."

He shook his head.

"That would have made you no safer, and would have spoilt you as an advertisement."

"As an advertisement!" she protested hotly. "Do soldiers let a woman run the risk of being murdered to make things safe far them? I think it's contemptible!"

"Yes," he said quietly; "so I see: but you don't think enough."

He sat looking at her in a way she detested; as no other man seemed able to look at her; as though she were a piece in a game he played.

"Did any one else know it wasn't safe for me?" she demanded.

He shook his head.

"Wouldn't you have been warned in that case?" he suggested.

"Yes," she returned warmly, "I'm quite certain I should."

"I think so too," he said. "Nothing in Sar would have been weighed beside it."

"Except by you," she retorted.

"Except by me," he said. "You see I'm here to weigh things. I'm here to look after you all. You think I should have told you of your danger, and shut you up in the safety of Sar. But there is no safety in Sar. That's the mistake. Your riding was a risk, but it helped our chance to make Sar safer; safer for every one, safer for you."

"And suppose I had been killed?"

"Well," he said, "you can fancy what I should have paid for it. But the safety would have been there, though it was only there for others. And it was to make that that I am here."

She met his musing observation of her with hard clear eyes.

"Haven't you wasted an unusual lot of time talking to me this morning, Captain Terrington?" she said.

He took the deep breath of a man whose heart is sick for sleep, and threw back his shoulders.

"Yes," he smiled, rising; "I was quite exceptionally tired."

V

Terrington gave a practical shape to his forebodings as soon as the Commissioner and his escort started for the Durbar.

The entire force was under arms; the Residency guard was trebled; sappers were stationed in every room to break open the loopholes; others waited with discs of guncotton to blow away the trees which masked the polo ground; and the final connexions were made with the mine which was to overthrow the courtyard wall.

Appearances were kept up by an attenuated fatigue party, which was as markedly visible about the place as the rest of the garrison was not.

Terrington, who had changed for polo, also made a peacefully indifferent figure as he strolled across to the mess-room and round the Residency garden, with a loose coat drawn over his riding-shirt, whose blue and silver showed in the scarf about his throat.

He had returned to his orderly-room in the Fort, when news of the tragedy which was to wring from England a growl of vengeance was brought to the sentries at the Residency gate by the handful of blood-smeared horsemen who swept through it with broken and clotted lances and a crimson lather on their horses' flanks.

Hussain Shah was holding Langford, mortally hurt, in the saddle, his huge figure swinging limply to and fro, and more than half that remnant of the escort reeled as they drew rein before the Residency door.

Terrington was not the first to hear of the disaster, but he heard it in the most dramatic fashion; from Mrs. Chantry's lips.

She had torn across the compound as the Lancers came to a blundering halt before the mess-room entrance, and dashed breathless into the orderly room, waiting no confirmation of the story that was told by their plight.

She caught at her side, clutching with the other hand at the table, and for an instant panted, speechless, her face white as jasmine, above a big bow of creamy lace.

Then, with a hard gasp of breath:

"They're killed!" she cried.

Terrington had sprung to his feet as she burst in upon him.

"Who are?" he demanded.

"Lewis and Sir Colvin," she panted, "and ... and most of the others. All but six or seven of them. Mr. Langford's there, but he's simply hacked; and all the men are streaming."

A long thin wail broke from her with the horror of what she had seen, and she covered her eyes with both her hands.

Terrington had stepped towards the doorway as he realized the significance of what she had seen. She put herself sharply in front of him, her head flung fiercely back.

"What are you going to do?" she demanded. "You let them go like that, you made them go like that! That's what's done it all! You wouldn't let them take the men! Aren't you going to try to save them? They mayn't be dead! Don't you think they mayn't be dead? If only you'll go at once; this moment! Take every one and smash them. Don't you think it's possible; just possible? And it wasn't I who did it, was it? was it really?"

He laid a hand upon her shoulder to put her aside.

"No, child," he said gently; "you had nothing to do with it."

As he would have passed out, leaping footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Captain Walcot almost dashed into his arms.

"Have you heard?" he cried.

"What?" asked Terrington

Walcot glanced with deprecation at Mrs. Chantry's figure.

"Say what you know!" said Terrington.

"Sir Colvin and Chantry have been murdered at the Durbar, and all the men they took in with them."

"Who told you?" said Terrington.

"Hussain Shah," replied the other excitedly. "Langford was in the courtyard with half the escort, when a yelling began inside the hall, and a swarm of those brown swine poured out shouting that Sir Colvin was killed, and attacked him. Langford charged, and tried to jam them in the doorway; but the crowd joined in behind, and when Langford was shot through the body Hussain retired 'em, and they had to cut their way through till they were clear of the Bazaar. Every man of them was wounded, and they've lost five and Langford's dying."

"Is Clones with him?"

Walcot nodded.

Terrington remained a moment without speaking, gazing almost absently through the window in the thick mud wall at the green grove of chenar. In his loose racing-coat above polo boots and breeches, and with the gay silk scarf at his throat, he suggested anything but a man suddenly met by a great emergency.

"Tell Subadar Afzul Singh," he said slowly, "to post the Fort guard, break out the loopholes and put the place at once in a state of defence. You will parade every other available man in the courtyard within half an hour, in marching order a hundred and fifty rounds a man. Dore will take over Langford's Sikhs and Dogras; the Bakót levies will reinforce the Fort guard. Send Risaldar Hussain Shah to me here."

Rose Chantry held her sobbing breath in astonishment at the note of control which had come into the man's voice. It was lower and softer than she had ever heard it, but it spoke with a quiet and assured authority which seemed to master her even while it addressed another.

Walcot felt it too. He was the elder of the two men, and but a few months junior in the service; they had lived together for some time on terms of perfect equality, yet now, though Terrington had made no reference to a change in their relations, Walcot's heels came together while the other was speaking, and his hand went to his cap with a "Very good, sir" as Nevile ended.

The phrase, the sudden change of relation, Walcot's retreating figure, disciplined and subordinate, produced on Rose Chantry a very curious effect.

"Are you going to take over the command?" she said to Terrington, who had seated himself at his desk and was writing rapidly.

He turned his head and looked at her, his mind evidently occupied with an interrupted thought.

"I have taken it over," he said quietly, turning again to his pen.

She watched him for a moment. His silence, his unconcern, his power, were all alike beyond her.

"Are you going to the Palace?" she asked at length.

He looked round at her again, as clearly preoccupied as before, but without irritation.

"You will save them, won't you, if you can?" she went on imploringly, to force the subject into his mind.

"Yes," he said slowly, "I'm going to the Palace." Then after a pause, but with his eyes still upon her, "Mr. Clones would probably be very glad of some help with the wounded."

"The wounded!" she repeated with a little shudder.

"Yes," he said; "you'll see a good deal of them during the next few days, and it's as well to be of use. If you'll take this to him," he went on, folding up a note, "he'll show you what to do. It's only the making up of bandages," he continued, as she held back; "the time left us is very short."

Something scornful had come into his voice, though ever so faintly, and something compelling as well. She took the note when he held it out to her, unable, despite her will, to do anything else. As she passed the doorway Hussain Shah appeared on the landing beyond it, the folds of the turban above his temple stiff with blood. She paused an instant to hear Terrington's greeting, but the greeting was in Pukhtu, which she did not understand. Had she understood, her opinion of Terrington's hardness would have been confirmed, for no reference was made to the wounded man's condition until he had received his orders.

"Are you fit for duty?" said Terrington simply.

"I am unhurt, sir," replied the other as he saluted.

Half an hour later every available man in the force was paraded in the courtyard of the Fort. Walcot with his Lancers in front; then, behind Terrington, the Sikhs and Dogras that could be spared from the Fort, the Guides bringing up the rear. The Maxim had been hoisted on to the roof of the Eastern Tower, whence it covered for a certain distance an advance on the Palace. In the silence the blow of a pick could be heard, and the falling stones from the last loopholes in the walls.

Terrington sat his horse immovably, waiting for the signal from Afzul Singh which should open the gates. He was burning with a dull anger against the circumstance in which he had been placed, and against the folly of the men who had created it. He knew that in marching on the Palace to demand the men who had entered it that morning he was imperilling the safety of his entire force; yet he knew, too, that sentimental England would never forgive his sanity in declining the risk should any of Sir Colvin's party happen to be still alive. He had no hope of their safety. He was too well acquainted with the temper in which they had been attacked. That he viewed with no resentment whatever. It had been a piece of the foulest treachery, but treachery was a virtue in Sar, and he was quite able to accept, and even to respect, alien standards of conduct.

What did anger him was the stolid British arrogance which declined to make allowance for any prejudices but its own, and thought beneath its dignity all considerations which were not in the terms of its own intelligence. Rose Chantry watched him from the orderly-room window which overlooked the courtyard. She had been in the surgery helping Clones to make up first-aid bandages, but the tramp of laden men down the long passages, and the roll, like a soft volley, of grounded butts in the dust as the men fell in, so wrought on her excitement that she left her work and ran up the narrow twisted stairs to the room from which half an hour earlier Terrington had sent her.

She watched him now, with her shoulder pressed against the yellow chunam wall and her head drawn back in order not to be seen, wondering how a man of his dominant authority could wait impassively at such a moment the arrangements of a subordinate.

Her eyes, dry and hot, seemed almost to repudiate resentfully the tears which she had shed; a pulse throbbed like the flutter of a moth at her throat; her uneasy fingers seemed to crave to be closed, and yet when she clenched her fist they ached to be opened. She longed to tear about, to give orders, to rouse enthusiasm. She would have liked to ride beside Terrington to the Palace and carry a flag: and the thought of how he would regard such a proposal moved her not to a sense of its humour but to renewed irritation with the man who could ride as indifferently to death as he would to a dinner.

Her whole being was in disorder owing to the uncertainty of her husband's fate. At the first shock and accepted inference of his death tears had burst from her in the weak wretchedness of bereavement, the sense of widowhood, and grief at the dying of one so near to her in the pride of his youth. It was perhaps the very nearness of death's-knife, the cutting off of the one who was one with her, who had scarcely gone from her arms, which gave her the keenest shudder. The sword which had been thrust through him seemed almost to have pricked her breast. Not that she feared for her own safety; she never imagined that it was compromised. She had the supreme British scorn for her country's foes, and thought it was only a question of policy whether Terrington with his handful of men would not at once burn the Palace to the ground, carry off the Khan in chains, and ravage the whole country with sword and fire.

It was death in the shadow which had stabbed and was gone which made her shiver. A thing so swift, so sudden, so unforeseen mocked the comfortable security of life.

But with the fitting out of the expedition and speculation on the possible safety of those in the Palace, her emotions became dreadfully perplexed. She had perforce to cease mourning a husband who might be still alive, and with the disappearance of a reason for her sorrow she began to wonder what had caused it.

Had she cried because she loved him or because he was killed? She had not a doubt while she thought him dead, but the chance of his being alive seemed to have altered everything. Last night she would have disowned indignantly the idea that she did not love him. She had accepted him as naturally in the order of needful things as food and clothing. He was her husband and so had everything that husbands have, did everything that husbands do. She had never thought about it as a personal matter. One had a husband as one had a cold in the head; one didn't always quite know why; but having him one accepted him for the sort of thing he was.

Lewis had taken her from a life already wearily dull, and with every prospect of becoming duller. He had come suddenly into her existence—a quite unlooked-for excitement; and had transplanted her into surroundings more exciting still; full of men, and dangers, and pageants and great affairs. It was so full indeed, that in the press of things to do he was a good deal crowded out. His work, his fresh appointments—for he had been tremendously in demand—gave him rather the air of continually arranging new scenes and effects in which she played the leading lady.

She didn't in the least so consciously regard him; she had not even noticed how much his work kept him out of the occasions which she most enjoyed; he seemed just a part of the delightful movement, a sort of dashing high-spirited hot-tempered ambitious concentration of it all. He was the man who had made it all possible for her, being her husband. That was how, gratefully, she most often thought of him.

His death wrenched her by its treacherous horror; but it had put no awkward questions. The questions came with the doubt if he were dead. How much did she care for him? Did she care for him at all? Had she ever cared for him as a husband? Right on the heels of that, answering it to her astounded perception, came a shrinking of disgust that she had lived three years with a man as his wife without loving him; without even discovering that she did not love him. It was that which seared the tears in her eyes, and left her with a sense of shame and self-disdain and loneliness indescribable.

It was that too in a curious reflected fashion which increased her anger at Terrington's quiet indifference to the ways of Fate. She could picture Lewis Chantry's raging vehemence under a like provocation.

As she watched the silent mass of men in the courtyard—the dull yellow of the field-service kit lightened by the gay alkalaks of the Lancers, the orange and white of their pennons, the glistening of the sun upon lance-head and bayonet, the silence broken only by the clink of a bridoon as some impatient horse flung up its head—there was a burst of blue and red above the eastern tower and the Union Jack flew out above the Fort.

It was the signal that Afzul Singh had completed his defences. Walcot rode back to Terrington and saluted. Terrington nodded. With a sparkle of light on their lances, the horsemen were in the saddle, the rifles leapt to the 'carry,' and were swung on to the shoulder, cresting the infantry with the shimmer of steel; the gates were thrown open, the Lancers passed through and extended, the Sikhs and Dogras wheeled outwards after them in column of fours, followed by the Guides.

As the gates closed behind the last section a sharp explosion rang out, followed by others in quick succession.

Rose Chantry started and stood quivering in tense excitement; then darted across the room to the further window, which looked towards the polo ground through a green fringe of chenar.

As she reached it there was another rending uproar almost under her feet, and a tree leapt into the air from beneath the window and fell with a crashing ruin of its branches towards the river.

Afzul Singh was converting the screen of chenar into an abattis with discs of gun cotton, but to Rose the trees seemed to be falling before the enemy's shells, and she ran hurriedly to the eastern tower to get a view of the besiegers, and found there Afzul Singh himself, who explained her mistake.

A sand-bag revetment crowned the top of the tower, and the loopholes on either side of the Maxim were manned by picked shots. All were intently watching the occasional glimpse of colour or gleam of steel which marked the progress of Terrington's force through the Bazaar.

Now that the din of the detonations had ceased not a sound broke the silence; the city lay listless and without a sign of life in the haze of its noontide heat. The dust rose on the heels of the column as it emerged from the Bazaar and filtered through the collection of low mud buildings beyond it. Clear of these, Terrington swung his right at once on to the river, and the whole of his little force could be seen for the first time as it extended and moved forward across the space of open ground to the east of the Palace. It looked painfully small for its job, like an ant attacking a mouse, even though Terrington made it as imposing as he could without sacrificing its compactness. The ground, flat as a floor from the river to the foot-hills, gave no command for rifle fire over the centre of the town, and Terrington had no choice but to march straight at the wall which surrounded the Khan's buildings, and chance their being defended. It was a dangerous piece of work, and Afzul Singh never lowered his glasses till the doubtful part of it was done.

But Terrington showed at once the temper in which he had undertaken it. His cavalry wheeled to the left, leaving the front open, and, advancing, formed a screen which covered the skirts of the town. The river protected the other flank, and, with the Guides in the centre as reserve, the Sikhs went straight for the eastern gate, while the Dogra detachment advanced half right upon the Palace stables where the wall ran down to the river. The guards on the gate allowed themselves to be taken, the stables were occupied without resistance, and a command was thus obtained of the Palace compound which was seen to be invitingly empty. But Terrington was the last man to be tempted by such an invitation. He had obtained a foothold from which to enforce his demands, and did not intend to go a step further.