Part 30 (2/2)

So, through the swarms of pensioners quarreling already over new t.i.tles and perquisites, through the groups of excited fanatics preparing for martyrdom about the Mosque, past Abool-Bukr, three parts drunk, boasting to ruffling blades of the European mistresses he meant to keep, the Queen's dhoolies went swaying out of the precincts; all yielding place to them. And beyond, in the denser, more dangerous crowd without, they pa.s.sed easily; for those tinsel-decked, tawdry canopies, screened with sodden musk and dirt-scented curtains, were sacred.

Sacred even to the refuse and rabble of the city, the dissolute eunuchs, the mob of retainers, palace guards, and blood-drunk soldierly surging through that long arched tunnel by the Lah.o.r.e gate, and hustling to get round that wide arch, and so, a few steps further, see the Commissioner standing at bay upon that wide curving red-stone stair that led upward. Standing and thinking of the women above; of one woman mostly. Standing, facing the wild sea of faces, waiting to see if that last appeal for help had been heard.

”Room! Room! for the Queen's dhoolies!”

The cry echoed above the roar of the crowd.

At last! He turned, to pa.s.s on the welcome news, perchance; but it was enough--that one waver of that stern face! There was a rush, a cry, a clang of steel on stone, a fall! And then up those wide curving stairs, like fiends incarnate, jostled a mad crew, elbowing each other, cursing each other, in their eagerness for that blow which would win Paradise.

Four crowns of glory in the first room, where the chaplain, the Captain, and the two English girls fell side by side. One in the next, where the Collector and Magistrate, weary and wounded, still lay alone.

”Way! Way! for the Queen's dhoolies!”

But they had come too late, as all things seemed to come too late on that fatal 11th of May.

Too late! Too late! The words dinned themselves into a horseman's brain, as he dashed out of the compound of a small house in Duryagunj and headed straight through the bazaar for the little house on the city wall by the Cashmere gate. And as he rode he shouted: ”_Deen!

Deen!_”

It was a convenient cry, and suited the trooper's dress he wore. He had had to shoot a man to get it, but he hoped to shoot many more when he had seen Alice Gissing in safety, and the Meerut column had come in. It could not be long now.

CHAPTER III.

DAYLIGHT.

Three miles away Kate Erlton sat in her home-like, peaceful drawing room, feeling dazzled. The suns.h.i.+ne, streaming through the open doors, seemed to stream into the very recesses of her mind as she sat, still looking at the letter which she had found half an hour before waiting for her beside a bunch of late roses which the gardener had laid on the table ready for her to arrange in the vases. The flowers were fading fast; the dog-cart waiting outside to take her on to see a sick friend ere the sun grew hot, s.h.i.+fted to find another shadow; but she did not move.

She was trying to understand what it all meant; really--deprived of her conventional thoughts about such things. And one sentence in the letter had a strange fascination for her. ”I am not such a fool as to think you will mind. I know you will get on much better without me.”

Of course. She had, in a way, accepted the truth of this years ago.

The fact must have been patent to him also all that time; and she had known that he accepted it.

But now, set down in black and white, it forced her into seeing--as she had never seen before--the deadly injury she had done to the man by not minding. And then the question came keenly--”Why had she not minded?” Because she had not been content with her bargain. She had wanted something else. What? The emotion, the refinement, the _fin-fleur_ of sentiment. Briefly, what made _her_ happy; what gave _her_ satisfaction. It was only, then, a question between different forms of enjoyment; the one as purely selfish as the other. More so, in a way, for it claimed more and carried the grievance of denial into every detail of life. She moved restlessly in her chair, confused by this sudden daylight in her mind; laid down the letter, then took it up again and read another sentence.

”I believe you used to think that I'd get the regiment some day; but I shouldn't--after all, the finish is the win or the lose of a race.”

The letter went down on the table again, but this time her head went down with it to rest upon it above her clasped hands. Oh! the pity of it! the pity of it! Yet how could she have avoided standing aloof from this man's life as she had done from the moment she had discovered she did not love him?

Suddenly she stood up, pressing those clasped hands tight to her forehead as if to hold in her thoughts. The sunlight, streaming in, shone right into her cool gray eyes, showing in a ray on the iris, as if it were pa.s.sing into her very soul.

If she had been this man's sister, instead of his wife, could she not have lived with him contentedly enough, palliating what could be palliated, gaining what influence she could with him, giving him affection and sympathy? Why, briefly, had she failed to make him what Alice Gissing had made him--a better man? And yet Alice Gissing did not love him; she had no romantic sentiment about him. Did she really lay less stress--she, the woman at whom other women held up pious hands of horror--on that elemental difference between the tie of husband and wife, and brother and sister than she, Kate Erlton, did, who had affected to rise superior to it altogether? It seemed so. She had asked for a purely selfish gratification of the mind. And Alice Gissing? A strange jealousy came to her with the thought, not for herself, but for her husband; for the man who was content to give up everything for a woman whom he ”loved very dearly.” That was true.

Kate had watched him for those three months, and she had watched Mrs.

Gissing too, and knew for a certainty the latter gave him nothing any woman might not have given him if she had been content to put her own claims for happiness, her own gratification, her own mental pa.s.sion aside. So a quick resolve came to her. He must not give up the finish, the win or the lose of the race, for so little. There was time yet for the chance. She had pleaded for one with a man a year ago; she would plead for it with a woman to-day.

She pa.s.sed into the veranda hastily, pausing involuntarily ere getting into the dog-cart before the still, sunlit beauty of that panorama of the eastern plains, stretching away behind the gardens which fringed the s.h.i.+ning curves of the river. There was scarcely a shadow anywhere, not a sign to tell that three miles down that river the man with whom she had pleaded a year ago was straining every nerve to give her and himself a chance, and that within the rose-lit, lilac-shaded city the chance of some had come and gone.

Nor, as she drove along the road intent on that coming interview in the hot little house upon the wall, was there any sign to warn her of danger. The Cashmere gate stood open, and the guard saluted as usual.

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