Part 16 (1/2)
He looked at it narrowly, wondering if he had ever noticed it before, then let the paddle sink idly across the boat, and sat staring at what he saw. Dering, of course! But the woman! Who on earth was she? A native? Hardly; and yet he did not remember seeing anyone at the ball whose dress was in the least like this; even in the dark it glittered.
”Do you call that love?” came a voice echoing softly over the water. ”I don't. When I love, I mean to give, not to take; and the more I give, the more I'll have to give; because, you see, love will come back--it must.”
By all that was incomprehensible, Laila Bonaventura! And, if there was any certainty in these shadows, Dering's arm--
Phew! Lance knew his Shakespeare also; had, in fact, a curiously ingenuous and human acquaintance with even the exact words of the great master. So as he drifted on, leaving those two in the balcony, a line drifted with him:--
”She whom I love now Doth grace for grace and love for love allow.
The other did not so.”
He felt a righteous relief at the idea, for he was eminently virtuous.
Poor old Vincent! This was better than the other--he paused doubtfully--Well! different people had different tastes. He, for instance, had never admired Mrs. Smith. And then Dering, good chap as he was, had, everybody knew, a touch of the tar-brush himself. Only a touch, still it made a difference; for one had to consider the children. For instance, when _he_ married--Why a vision of a child's head he had once seen, far away in the north, covered with soft, waving curls of sun-bright red-gold hair, chestnut--yes, chestnut hair, the very colour of that beast of a pony who boshed him at polo--should have come to him at that moment he did not know; but he fled from it, bashful as any girl over her first fancy, and, bending forward, sent the canoe racing the foam-bubbles on the swifter current with all the strength of his young arms.
That was the mission house, ending the long curve of the city. The mission house, where _she_ slept--the boat raced harder here--where _she_ lived in the thick of it--G.o.d bless her! Here the boat slackened, partly because the spit was reached, and in the darkness, made visible by that soft white radiance behind him, he must not miss Am-ma's hut.
Am-ma, who had dominion over wild duck, among other things in that munificent gift of the Creator to His own image. Am-ma, who must come out and show those who had fallen from their high estate through civilization how to lure the birds to their death.
”_Sweet is true Love though given in vain, And sweet is Death which puts an end to pain_.”
The refrain came back in this connection, and Lance's voice, as he sang it, if not musical, held a hint of something beyond the mere maudlin expression-stop of the ordinary song-singer.
He need not, he told himself, have feared to overlook Am-ma's wigwam; for there, not far from the point of the spit it stood, all lit up; circled round closely with a row of little lights like those at the palace. Were the primitive folk down here aping their masters and having a ball of their own? Smiling at the thought, he ran the canoe on sh.o.r.e and walked up to the reed hut. Then he saw that the circle of lights was broken by a dark patch. It was Am-ma himself, squatting on his heels. To one side of him, firmly fixed in the sand, was a freshly-killed crocodile's head, its jaws ingeniously distended by a thin cane to which a string was attached. By pulling this the dead mouth seemed to open and shut, as the pliant rattan bent under the strain and sprang back again. In his other hand he held a b.l.o.o.d.y spear.
Despite these fearful preparations, however, the first glimpse of an approaching figure set him visibly trembling with fright; until, on its coming nearer the lights, he sprang to his feet with a sudden blubbering shout of relief.
”I thought--this fool, this atom of dust, thought--the _Huzoor_ was the devil!” he explained, capering and chuckling to make much of the joke, now that the fear of its being a reality was over.
”The devil!” echoed Lance. ”What the d.i.c.kens should the devil come here for?”
Am-ma looked half-grave, half-important. Did not the _Huzoor_ know, he explained, that when life was coming into the world, all the demons in it wanted to get hold of the new-born thing? Hence the lights, hence the crocodile's head and the spear; also his own valiance. Hence, also, the impossibility of his accompanying the Presence after duck. If he, the father of the thing to be born, was not there to fight the demons, what hope could there be for the son?--and here this quaint, broad, ugly face grew wistful--for it must be a son, surely, this time. No! he had no children; the demons had taken them all, every one; though he had left nothing undone, though he had sought out one medicine-man after another. What did it matter? he asked pathetically, if the charm were of one faith or another, if it brought a child. He had tried all.
His own and everybody else's. But they all died, the children, girls and boys; died when they were born. The demon somehow slipped through the lights; the charm was not strong enough; that was all. So this time, when he had seen that the _Huzoors_ had the _Dee-puk-rag_, the sign of kings, that they were, indeed, light-bringers, as his people had been of old, he had sent for the Miss-_sahiba_, and she had come.
She was there in the hut, even now, fighting the demons.
Lance gave a quick catch of his breath, and stood silent. Right over the miserable reed hut, clear against the violet of the moonless sky, rose those palaces of stars lit up for pleasure. It almost seemed to him that the slight breeze, which was beginning to whisper of the dawn, held in it the faint rhythm of a distant waltz.
And here, at his feet, was this hut, lit up for pain. He heard that also, in a faint moan, which sent a s.h.i.+ver through him; the s.h.i.+ver of one who finds himself bare of accustomed covering, out in the open, far from any shelter from the cold sky.
”Of course you can't come, Am-ma,” he said, moving off. ”Well! I hope the Miss-_sahiba_ will--will keep the devil away. I--I--expect she will!”
As he floated a little further down stream, vaguely obeying the instructions which Am-ma, regretful for all his anxiety, had shouted after him, he told himself that if anybody could, she would. If a fellow married her, for instance--
He drew the canoe on to the sand-bank, Am-ma had spoken of, somewhat sooner than his directions warranted, in order to stifle thought by action. And it needed every sense on the alert to tell in the darkness if one was keeping a fairly straight path. That scarcely audible ”_lip, lip_” on the right meant that the water was close by, running an inch or two below a sheer yet crumbling edge of earth. That yielding softness on the left meant the ridge of dry sand. His way was between the two. Every now and again a watchful quack, a distant flutter, told him that the ducks were not far off. And in the east the faintest lightening of the purple warned him he was none too soon, since the dawn in India comes quickly.
But this must be the place; a sort of bunker right at the end of the bank. Here, cuddling down almost luxuriously into loose dry sand, still warm from yesterday's sun, he waited for that hint of light in the far east to grow strong enough for him to see.
It is always an experience to sit and wait for daylight, ignorant, helpless till it comes, of what lies close at hand. Lance Carlyon, crouching in that still warm sand, felt a sudden forlornness, a sense of having parted with something.
But, almost on the heels of this, came a sense of having found something; of strange, quick, new, yet familiar companions.h.i.+p. It seemed to him as he watched that faint grey lightening in the far east, that he did so, not as Lance Carlyon, but as an atom in the great, round, spinning world whose curved edge grew darker against the coming light.