Part 41 (1/2)
Outside, brazen earth and brazen sky glared at one another with malignant intensity. Two bullocks lounged under the bananas by the mill wheel flicking lazy tails when the flies presumed too shamelessly upon their apathy; and crows, with beaks agape, hopped resignedly from one burning patch of shade to another. Among the verandah roof-beams, three grey squirrels argued, with subdued chitterings, over a kipper's head stolen from a breakfast plate; and at intervals a piteous wailing came from the servants' quarters, where, as all knew, Nizam Din, kitmutgar, was beating his pretty wife, Miriam Bibi, for the third time that week, because she had grown careless in the matter of covering her face, since the coming of Zyarulla, whose arrogant magnificence had created a flutter in more than one respectable household.
But Quita's letter, written in her 'garden' on a boulder, before breakfast, had transported Lenox many hundred miles away from it all.
The cluttering of squirrels, and the cries of poor Miriam Bibi entered his ears; but the spirit of him was back among the mountains; the scent of warm pine-needles was is his nostrils, the spell of his wife's face and voice upon his heart.
A sudden sense of suffocation dispelled the dream. He found himself breathless, in a bath of perspiration. The punkah had stopped dead.
And one must have endured this trifling inconvenience to gauge the significance of those five words.
Lenox straightened himself with an oath. ”_Kencho_.[1] . . . you son of a jackal!” he thundered; at the same time jerking the punkah frill, an effective means of reanimating the long-suffering punkah coolie, who has a trick of twisting the rope round his arm, that he may jerk it the more easily in his dreams.
But Lenox's vigorous pull merely brought a great length of rope through the wall; and his command was answered by the groans of a man in torment. Springing up, he wrenched open the gla.s.s door; and a blast as from a furnace struck him across the face. The coolie, a brown, distorted ma.s.s, writhed upon the hot stones in mortal agony. At the Sahib's approach, he struggled to his knees with a rush of incoherent detail; while Lenox shouted for Zyarulla, and the dogcart; flung a word of encouragement to the stricken man, and went in again for his helmet.
Till the trap appeared Lenox paced the verandah; the punkah coolie groaned; and Zyarulla protested as openly as he dared against his Sahib being put to personal inconvenience for a base-born--mere dust of the earth. None the less, at the Sahib's order he gingerly helped the dust of the earth into the trap, where Lenox put his one available arm round the writhing body; and the _sais_, who showed small relish for the situation, was ordered to get up and drive from behind. The which he did; leaning over the back seat, and keeping ostentatiously clear of the misbegotten son of a pig who had broken his midday sleep.
In this fas.h.i.+on they journeyed, awkwardly enough, to the temporary cholera hospital; a handful of tents and gra.s.s huts on the outskirts of the station. Betwixt the clutches of cramp, and the abject humility of his kind, the coolie slithered from the seat on to the mat; and Lenox had some ado to prevent his falling headlong from the cart. But in due time he was handed over safely to a suave, coffee-coloured hospital a.s.sistant, and carried shrieking into a tent crammed with sights unfit to be told; whence he emerged, two hours later, without protest of voice or limb, to swell the intermittent stream of fellow-corpses that flowed from the hospital to the burning ghatt or the Mahommedal burial-ground outside the station.
When Lenox staggered back into the hall, dizzy with headache, and half-blinded with glare, he was met by Desmond, who, noticing a slight lurch as he entered, took hold of his arm.
”Zyarulla told me what happened,” he said, a great gentleness in his voice. ”Come on to your room, old man. Take a rousing dose of phenacetin, and lie down till tiffin. I'll bring you a lime-squash.”
”Thanks. You are a d.a.m.ned good sort, Desmond. The sun's touched me up, I fancy. I shall be all right in a couple at hours.”
But before two hours were out, Desmond's orderly was speeding through the dust to the Doctor Sahib's house; and Desmond himself had gone hurriedly to his wife's room, where she too was lying down after her morning's duties. She rose at his coming, holding out both hands. For she read disaster in his eyes.
”Darling, what has gone wrong?”
”It's Lenox. He's down with it. Not severe as yet. But there's no mistaking what it is.”
Her faint colour--it had grown perceptibly fainter in the past week--left her face.
”Oh, his poor wife! We must send a wire at once.”
”I've sent one already, by the orderly who went for Courtenay. Told her she should have news every day, for the present.”
”Oh, bless you, Theo! You think of everything!”
”Steady, Honor, steady,” he rebuked her gently. ”We've got to do a fair share of thinking between us just now. Paul can safely stay on if one isolates that side of the house; and Zyarulla and I can do everything for Lenox between us. As for you, John must give you a bed till we're through.”
”But, Theo . . .”
”Be quiet!” he broke in almost roughly; adding on a changed note: ”For once in a way, my dearest, you will obey orders without question--or go altogether. Now give me the chlorodyne, and let me get back to poor Lenox. Seems brutal to give him any form of opium after all he's been through. Hullo, there's Richardson shouting outside. He'll be terribly cut up when he knows.”
It transpired that Richardson had come over, post-haste, to report three cases among his men; and at sun-down the little mountain battery, with its three subalterns and full camp equipment, marched out into the open desert, scornfully overlooked by that Pisgah height of the Frontier, the Takti Suliman, whose square-cut crags were printed in sharp outline upon a stainless sky.
[1] Pull.
CHAPTER XX.