Part 35 (2/2)
At the distant building the Colonel found an abandoned broken-wheeled bullock-cart, from which he looted the bottom-boards, which were planks six feet long, laid upon, but not fastened to, the framework of the body of the cart. From the compound of the place (an ancient and rarely-visited dak-bungalow, probably the most outlying and deserted in India) he procured a bamboo pole that had once supported a lamp, the long leg-rests of an old chair, and two or three sticks, more or less serviceable for his purpose.
Returning to the camel, he ascended to where his pa.s.senger and pupil awaited him. Over his shoulder he bore the planks, pole and sticks that the contemptuous but invaluable camel had borne to a point a few yards below the scene of the tragedy.
”Good egg,” observed the younger man. ”We'll do him up in those like a mummy.”
”Yes,” returned the Colonel, ”then carry him to the oont and bind him along one side of the saddle, and then lead the beast down. Easily sling him on to the machine, and there we are. Lucky we've got the coil of cord. Fine demonstration for the Kot Ghazi fellers! Show that the thing can be done, even without the proper kind of 'plane and surgical outfit. What luck we spotted him--or that he fell just in our return track!”
”Doubtless he was born to that end,” observed the Captain, who was apt to get a little peevish when hungry and tired.
And when the Army Aeroplane _Hawk_ returned from its ”ground-scouring for casualties” trip, lo, it bore, beneath and beside the pilot and pa.s.senger, a real casualty slung in a kind of crude coffin-cradle of planks and poles, a casualty in whose recovery the Colonel took the very deepest interest, for was he not a heaven-sent case, born to the end that he might be smashed to demonstrate the Colonel's theories?
But no credit was given to the vultures, without whom the ”casualty”
would never have been found.
CHAPTER XIII.
FOUND.
Colonel John Decies, I.M.S. (retired), visiting the Kot Ghazi Station Hospital, whereof his friend and pupil, Captain Digby-Soames, was Commandant, scanned the temperature chart of the unknown, the desperately injured ”case,” retrieved by his beloved flying-machine, who, judging by his utterances in delirium, appeared to be even worse damaged in spirit than he was in body.
”Very high again last night,” he observed to Miss Norah O'Neill of the Queen Alexandra Military Nursing Sisterhood.
”Yes, and very violent,” replied Miss O'Neill. ”I had to call two orderlies and they could hardly hold him. He appeared to think he was fighting a huge snake or fleeing from one. He also repeatedly screamed: 'It is under my foot! It is moving, moving, moving _out_.'”
”_Got it_, by G.o.d!” cried the Colonel, suddenly smiting his forehead with violence. ”_Of course!_ Fool! Fool that I am! Merciful G.o.d in Heaven--_it's her boy_--and _I_ have saved him! _Her boy!_ And I've been cudgelling my failing addled brains for months, wondering where I had seen his face before. He's my G.o.dson, Sister, and I haven't set eyes on him for the last--nearly twenty years!”
Miss Norah O'Neill had never before seen an excited doctor in a hospital ward, but she now beheld one nearly beside himself with excitement, joy, surprise, and incredulity. (It is sad to have to relate that she also heard one murmuring over and over again to himself, ”Well, I am d.a.m.ned”.)
At last Colonel John Decies announced that the world was a tiny, small place and a very rum one, that it was just like _The Hawk_ to be the means of saving _her_ boy of all people, and then took the patient's hand in his, and sat studying his face, in wondering, pondering silence.
To Miss Norah O'Neill this seemed extraordinarily powerful affection for a mere _G.o.dson_, and one lost to sight for twenty years at that.
Yet Colonel Decies was a bachelor and, no, the patient certainly resembled him in no way whatsoever. The tiny new-born germ of a romance died at once in Miss O'Neill's romantic heart--and yet, had she but known, here was a romance such as her soul loved above all things--the son of the adored dead mistress discovered _in extremis_, and saved, by the devout platonic lover, the life-long lover, and revealed to him by the utterance of the pre-natally learnt words of the dead woman herself!
Yes--how many times through those awful days had Decies heard that heart-rending cry! How cruelly the words had tortured him! And here, they were repeated twenty years on--for the identification of the son by the friend!
That afternoon Colonel Decies dispatched a cablegram addressed to a Miss Gavestone, Monksmead, Souths.h.i.+re, England, and containing the words, ”Have found him, Kot Ghazi, bad accident, doing well, Decies,”
and by the next mail Lucille, with Aunt Yvette and a maid, left Port Said, having travelled overland to Brindisi and taken pa.s.sage to Egypt by the _Osiris_ to overtake the liner that had left Tilbury several days before the cable reached Monksmead. And in Lucille's largest trunk was an article the like of which is rarely to be found in the baggage of a young lady--nothing more nor less than an ancient rapier of Italian pattern!...
To Lucille, who knew her lover so well, it seemed that the sight and feel of the wors.h.i.+pped Sword of his Ancestors must bring him comfort, self-respect, memories, thoughts of the joint youth and happiness of himself and her.
She knew what the Sword had been to him, how he had felt a different person when he held its inspiring hilt, how it had moved him to the telling of his wondrous dream and stories of its stirring past, how he had revered and loved it ...surely it must do him good to have it? If he were stretched upon a bed of sickness, and it were hung where he could see it, it _must_ help him. It would bring diversion of thought, cheer him, suggest bright memories--perhaps give him brave dreams that would usurp the place of bad ones.
If he were well or convalescent it might be even more needful as a tonic to self-respect, a reminder of high tradition, a message from dead sires. Yes, surely it must do him good where she could not. If there were any really insurmountable obstacle to their--their --union--the Sword could still be with him always, and say unceasingly: ”Do not be world-beaten, son of the de Warrennes and Stukeleys. Do not despair. Do not be fate-conquered. Fight! Fight!
Look upon me not as merely the symbol of struggle but as the actual Sword of your actual Fathers. Fight Fate! Die fighting--but do not live defeated”--but of course her hero Dam needed no such exhortations. Still--the Sword must be a comfort, a pleasure, a hope, an inspiration, a symbol. When she brought it him he would understand.
Swords were to sever, but _the_ Sword should be a link--a visible bond between them, and between them again and their common past.
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