Part 52 (2/2)

”I am sure no one could have done more, and I know I couldn't have done a quarter so much; and I'm grateful,” he said awkwardly. Then with the best intentions, born from a real pity for the haggard man who sat on the edge of his cot looking as men do after a struggle of weeks with malarial fever, he added, ”And the luck has been a bit against you all the time, hasn't it?”

”As yet, perhaps,” replied Jim Douglas, feeling inclined then and there to start cityward, ”but the game isn't over. When I go back----”

”Hodson says you could do no good,” continued the big man, still with the best intentions.

”I don't agree with him,” retorted the other sharply.

”Perhaps not--but--but I wouldn't, if I were you. Or--rather--_I_ should of course--only--you see it is different for me. She----” Major Erlton paused, finding it difficult to explain himself. The memory of that last letter he had written to Kate was always with him, making him feel she was not, in a way, his wife. He had never regretted it.

He had scarcely thought what would happen if she came back from the dead, as it were, to answer it; for he hated thought. Even now the complexity of his emotions irritated him, and he broke through them almost brutally. ”She was my wife, you see. But you had nothing to do with it; so you had better leave it alone. You've done enough already.

And as I said before, I'm grateful.”

So he had stalked away, leaving his hearer frowning. It was true. The luck had been against him. But what right had it to be so? Above all, what right had that big brutal fellow to say so? There he was going off to win more distinction, no doubt. He would end by getting the Victoria Cross, and confound him! from what people said of him, he would well deserve it.

While he? Even these two days had brought his failure home to him. And yet he told himself, that if he had failed to save one Englishwoman, others had failed to save hundreds. Fresh as he was to the facts, they seemed to him almost incredible. As he wandered round the Ridge inspecting that rear-guard of graves, or sat talking to some of the thousand-and-odd sick and wounded in hospital, listening to endless tales of courage, pluck, sheer dogged resistance, he realized at what a terrible cost that armed force, varying from three to six thousand men, had simply clung to the rocks and looked at the city. There seemed enough heroism in it to have removed mountains; and coming upon him, not in the monotonous sequence of day-to-day experience, but in a single impression, the futility of it left him appalled. So did the news of the world beyond Delhi, heard, reliably, for the first time.

Briefly, England was everywhere on her defense. It seemed to him as if from that mad dream of conquest within the city he had pa.s.sed to as strange a dream of defeat. And why? The fire, unchecked at first, had blazed up with fresh fuel in place after place and left?--Nothing. Not a single attempt to wrest the government of the country from us; not even an organized resistance, when once the order to advance had been given. Had there been some mysterious influence abroad making men blind to the truth?

It was about to pa.s.s away if there had been, he felt, when on the 14th, he watched John Nicholson re-enter the Ridge at the head of his column. And many others felt the same, without in any way disparaging those who for long months of defense had borne the burden and heat of the day. They simply saw that Fate had sent a new factor into the problem, that the old order was changing. The defense was to be attack.

And why not, with that reinforcement of fine fighting men? Played in by the band of the 8th, amid cheering and counter-cheering, which almost drowned the music, it seemed fit--as the joke ran--if not to face h.e.l.l itself, at any rate to take _Pandymonium_. The 52d Regiment looked like the mastiff to which its leader had likened it. The 2d Sikhs were admittedly the biggest fellows ever seen. The wild Mooltanee Horse sat their lean Beloochees with the loose security of seat which tells of men born to the saddle.

Jim Douglas noted these things like his fellows; but what sent that thrill of confidence through him was the look on many a face, as at some pause or turn it caught a glimpse of the General's figure. It was that heroic figure itself, seen for the first time, riding ahead of all with no unconsciousness of the attention it attracted! but with a self-reliant acceptance of the fact--as far from modesty as it was from vanity--that here rode John Nicholson ready to do what John Nicholson could do. But in the pale face, made paler by the darkness of the beard, there was more than this. There was an almost languid patience as if the owner knew that the men around him said of him, ”If ever there is a desperate deed to do in India, John Nicholson is the man to do it,” and was biding his time to fulfill their hopes.

The look haunted Jim Douglas all day, stimulating him strangely. Here was a man, he felt, who was in the grip of Fate, but who gave back the grip so firmly that his Fate could not escape him. Gave it back frankly, freely, as one man might grip another's hand in friends.h.i.+p.

And then he smiled, thinking that John Nicholson's hand-clasp would go a long way in giving anyone a help over a hard stile. If he had had a lead-over like that after the smash came; if even now---- Idle thoughts, he told himself; and all because the picturesqueness of a man's outward appearance had taken his fancy, his imagination. For all he knew, or was ever likely to know----

He had been sitting idly on the edge of his cot in the tiny tent Major Erlton had lent him, having in truth nothing better to do, and now a voice from the blaze and blare of the heat and light outside startled him.

”May I come in--John Nicholson?”

He almost stammered in his surprise; but without waiting for more than a word the General walked in, alone. He was still in full uniform; and surely no man could become it more, thought Jim Douglas involuntarily.

”I have heard your story, Mr. Douglas,” he began in a sonorous but very pleasant voice. ”It is a curious one. And I was curious to see you. You must know so much.” He paused, fixed his eyes in a perfectly unembara.s.sed stare on his host's face, then said suddenly, with a sort of old-fas.h.i.+oned courtesy: ”Sit you down again, please; there isn't a chair, I see; but the cot will stand two of us. If it doesn't it will be clearly my fault.” He smiled kindly. ”Wounded too--I didn't know that.”

”A scratch, sir,” put in his hearer hastily, fighting shy even of that commiseration. ”I had a little fever in the city; that is all.”

The bright hazel eyes, with a hint of sunlight in them, took rather an absent look. ”I should like to have done it myself. I've tried that sort of thing; but they always find me out.”

”I fancy you must be rather difficult to disguise,” began Jim Douglas with a smile, when John Nicholson plunged straight into the heart of things.

”You must know a lot I want to know. Of course I've seen Hodson and his letters; but this is different. First: Will the city fight?”

”As well as it knows how, and it knows better than it did.”

”So I fancied. Hodson said not. By the way, he told me that you declared his Intelligence Department was simply perfect. And his accounts--I mean his information--wonderfully accurate.”

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