The Native Born; or, the Rajah's People Part 52

Cary's pitiful meanings.

"Oh, Beatrice, Beatrice, where are you?"

Geoffries turned his stained face to the Colonel's.

"Beatrice! That's Miss Cary, isn't it? Anything happened to her?"

Colonel Carmichael shrugged his shoulders with the impatience of a man whose nerves are overstrained by anxiety.

"I don't know--we've lost her," he said. "We must do something at once. Heaven alone knows what has happened."

No one indeed knew what had happened--not even the lonely man who waited, revolver in hand, for the final encounter on whose issue hung the fortunes of them all.

Only one knew, and that was Beatrice herself as she stood before the shattered doorway of the Colonel's drawing-room, amidst the debris of wrecked, shot-riddled furniture, face to face with Nehal Singh.

CHAPTER IX

HALF-LIGHT

Once before she had placed herself in his path, trusting to her skill, her daring, above all, her beauty. With laughter in her heart and cold-blooded coquetry she had chosen out the spot before the altar where the sunlight struck burnished gold from her waving hair and lent deeper, softening shades to her eyes. With cruel satisfaction, not unmixed with admiration, she had seen her power successful and the awe-struck wonder and veneration creep into his face. In the silence and peace of the temple she had plunged reckless hands into the woven threads of his life. Amidst the shriek of war, face to face with death, she sought to save him. It was another woman who stood opposite the yielding, cracking door, past whose head a half-spent bullet spat its way, burying itself in the wall behind her,--another woman, disheveled, forgetful of her wan beauty, trusting to no power but that which her heart gave her to face the man she had betrayed and ruined.

Yet both in an instantaneous flash remembered that first meeting. The drawn sword sank, point downward. He stood motionless in the shattered doorway, holding out a hand which commanded, and obtained, a petrified, waiting silence from the armed horde whose faces glared hatred and the l.u.s.t of slaughter in the narrow s.p.a.ce behind. Whatever had been his resolution, whatever the detestation and contempt which had filled him, all sank now into an ocean of reborn pain.

"Why are you here?" he asked sternly. "Why have you not fled?"

"We are all here," she answered. "None of us has fled. Did you not know that?"

He looked about him. A flash of scorn rekindled in his somber eyes.

"You are alone. Have they deserted you?"

"They do not know that I am here. I crept back of my own free will--to speak with you, Nehal."

Both hands clasped upon his sword-hilt, erect, a proud figure of misfortune, he stood there and studied her, half-wonderingly, half-contemptuously. The restless forces at his back were forgotten.

They were no more to him than the p.a.w.ns with which his will played life and death. He was their G.o.d and their faith. They waited for his word to sweep out of his path the white-faced Englishwoman who held him checked in the full course of his victory. But he did not speak to them, but to her, in a low voice in which scorn still trembled.

"You are here, no doubt, to intercede for those others--or for yourself. You see, I have learned something in these two years. It is useless. No one can stop me now."

"No one?"

He smiled, and for the first time she saw a sneer disfigure his lips.

"Not even you, Miss Cary. You have done a great deal with me--enough perhaps to justify your wildest hopes--but you have touched the limits of your powers and of my gullibility. Or did you think there were no limits?"

"I do not recognize you when you talk like that!" she exclaimed.

"That is surprising, seeing that you have made me what I am," he answered. Then he made a quick gesture of apology. "Forgive me, that sounded like a reproach or a complaint. I make neither. That is not my purpose."

"And yet you have the right," she said, drawing a deep breath, "you have every right, Nehal. It does not matter what the others did to you. I know that does not count an atom in comparison to my responsibilities. You trusted me as you trusted no one else, and I deceived you. So you have the right to hate me as you hate no one else. And yet--is it not something, does it not mitigate my fault a little, that I deceived myself far, far more than I ever deceived you?" He raised his eyebrows. There was mockery in the movement, and she went on, desperately resolute: "I played at loving you, Nehal. I played a comedy with you for my own purposes. And one day it ceased to be a comedy. I did not know it. I did not know what was driving me to tell the truth, and reveal myself to you in the ugliest light I could.

I only knew it was something in me stronger than any other impulse of my life. I know what it is now, and you must know, too. Can't you understand? If it had been no more than a comedy, you must have found me out--months ago. But you never found me out. It was _I_ who told you what I had done and who I was--"

"Why did you tell me?" He took an involuntary step toward her.

Something in his face relaxed beneath the force of an uncontrollable emotion. He was asking a question which had hammered at the gates of his mind day after day and in every waking hour. "Why?" he repeated.

"I have told you--because I had to. I had to speak the truth. I couldn't build up my new life on an old lie. You had to know. I had won your love by a trick. I had to show you the lowest and worst part of myself before the best in me could grow--the best in me, which is yours."

"You are raving!"

"I am not raving. You must see I am not. Look at me. I am calmer than you, though I face certain death. I knew when I came here that the chances were I should be killed before I even saw you, but I had to risk that. I had to win your trust back somehow, honestly and fairly.

I can not live without your trust."

"Beatrice!" The name escaped him almost without his knowledge. He saw tears spring to her eyes.

"It is true. Your love and your trust have become my life. Then I was unworthy of both. I tried to make myself worthy. I did what I could. I told you the truth--I threw away the only thing that mattered to me. I could not hold your love any longer by a lie--I loved you too much!"

For that moment the pa.s.sionate energy of her words, the sincerity and eloquence of her glance, swept back every thought of suspicion. He stood stupefied, almost overwhelmed. Mechanically his lips formed themselves to a few broken sentences.

"You can not know what you are saying. You are beside yourself. Once, in my ignorance, I believed it possible, but now I know that it could never be. Your race despises mine--"

"I do not care what you are nor to whom you belong!" she broke in, exulting. "You are the man who taught me to believe that there is something in this world that is good, that is worthy of veneration; who awoke in me what little good I have. I love you. If I could win you back--"

"What then?"

"I would follow you to the world's end!"

"As my wife?"

"As your wife!"

He held out his arms toward her, impulse rising like the sun high and splendid above the mists of distrust. It was an instant's forgetfulness, which pa.s.sed as rapidly as it had come. His arms sank heavily to his side.

"Have you thought what that means? If you go with me, you must leave your people for ever."

"I would follow you gladly."

He shook his head.

"You do not understand. You must leave them now--now when I go against them."

"No!" she broke in roughly. "You can't, Nehal, you can't. You have the right to be bitter and angry; you have not the right to commit a crime. And it would be a crime. You are plunging thousands into bloodshed and ruin--" He lifted his hand, and the expression in his eyes checked her.

"So it is, after all, a bargain that you offer me!" he said. "You are trying to save them. You offer a high price, but I am not a merchant.

I can not buy you, Beatrice."

"It is not a bargain!" For the first time she faltered, taken aback by the pitiless logic of his words. "Can't you see that? Can't you see that, however much I loved you, I could not act otherwise than implore you to turn back from a step that means destruction for those bound to me by blood and country? Could I do less?"