The Hosts of the Lord Part 35

She looked it, as, when all was ready, she leant, straining her eyes into the darkness for a hint of Am-ma's return. "He must come," she muttered to herself, "he shall come!"

And he did. A bigger wave came sweeping up to the wall as a herald, and then a voice calling for a rope. Half a dozen were ready posted in the men's hands from various points of vantage. They flew outwards; one, from Am-ma's hands inwards to a group holding a lantern on the steps.

So, with a silent haul, the pioneers had the raft stopped, and sidling slowly back to mooring against the wall.

Then Lance turned to Erda hesitating, divided between his loyalty to Vincent, and to her.

"The palace ought to be warned," he said briefly--"if I go there ahead on Am-ma's craft, I could pick you up on your way down. Could you manage?"

She gave a look round on the men, eager with the sudden excitement, with the rush, with the very novelty of it all, and laughed--positively laughed. "Manage? Yes! of course I can manage--_havildar!_ see those cartridges are put well back out of the wet--stay! bring down that table, someone, and give it a lash--"

Yet, despite this absolute lack of fear, despite the fact that she evidently wanted and desired no more consideration than a man, Lance felt a wild dislike to leaving her there alone, as he stepped on to Am-ma's skin craft, and, edging his way along by the wall, prepared to drift down to the palace balcony. It was mirk dark now, and he had no fear of being seen by the crowd on the bathing steps and the courtyard, though he punted his way with the paddle shaft within a yard or two of the sh.o.r.e; for he wanted to judge how far excitement had spread, how far the crowd was aware of what was coming at dawn.

To judge by appearances, not at all. There was no more restlessness, no more movement than was inevitable in such a concourse of men, women, and children. Here and there files of shadowy forms drifted about, but the most of them, seen by the little lights set on the ground beside each group, were in heaps, like the heaps of dead on a battle-field, huddled up on each other, sleeping, resting, indistinguishable, shrouded in their shawls, waiting for the dawn to come.

And, above the soft, yet increasing murmur of the still windless storm, came a softer murmuring of prayers, a weird low chanting.

The Hosts of the Lord had not yet risen to battle. The Spirit had not moved; the Word had not been made manifest.

The palace, also, lay as yet undisturbed, unseen, in the darkness.

Except for a glimmer of red light just above the river, a paler glimmer closer at hand.

The red light must be by the stairs for which he was steering.

The other?--

He did not know, but as he slipped past it another murmuring as of prayer seemed to come from within. It must come from the chapel; if so, then Pidar Narayan must be awake also. He felt a certain relief at the thought when he caught sight of the canoe at the bottom of the steps.

Then Vincent, as he had feared, was there; but not on the errand he had feared, if Pidar Narayan knew of it. So, mooring his strange craft to the canoe, he ran up the stairs eagerly.

CHAPTER XXI

MARGHERITA

Father Ninian had been awake all night. He had been vaguely uneasy all day, conscious, with that fine perception of his, that something was amiss. But it was no fear of what _might_ happen which had kept him watching when others slept. It was the memory of something which _had_ happened; for, by a coincidence that for more than fifty years had never lost its mystical significance for Ninian Bruce--sentimentalist as he was to his finger tips--the night of the _Vaisakh_ festival, when the pilgrims watched for the dawn to guide them on their way to the 'Cradle of the G.o.ds,' was to him, personally, the saddest and gladdest of the whole year. Since it was the night on which he had sinned the great sin of his life, and repented of it, even in the sinning.

And that sinning, that repenting, was no slight thing to him. It was the man himself; for the pa.s.sion that was in him in his youth was in him in his old age. It had only changed its dwelling-place. It had fled from the senses, and found refuge in the emotions. In a way, indeed, by thus seeking freedom from it, he had fallen into a greater thraldom, so that his whole life had been as much swayed by this renunciation of a woman as it would have been by her possession.

Old as he was, this very night had brought him--with the thought that Death could not delay much longer, and that next _Vaisakh_ festival might find him no lonely watcher--that thrill of self-absorption in another self, that claim for all, which is the essence of pa.s.sion. For this woman, waiting for him in the land where there is no marrying or giving in marriage, was still a woman; still the one of all G.o.d's creatures whom he claimed, and who claimed him, even as the first woman claimed the first man in Paradise.

So he had pa.s.sed the night watches of the Festival of Spring: as he had always pa.s.sed them. Partly in his room, that room made holy by her presence in his heart, partly in the chapel, made holy by the Bodily Presence of Him for Whose sake he had renounced her. The two holinesses were inextricably mixed in Pidar Narayan's mind.

He had finished one of the ma.s.ses for the repose of a sinning yet sainted soul, and, before repeating the next, was confessing his own repentance in his room, when that hasty footstep along the pa.s.sage, which alarmed those two lovers in the balcony nearer the garden, had resounded through the arches. It had disturbed, but not startled him, its very boldness rea.s.suring him of its right to be there. Probably it was some messenger from the police camp or the Fort. So he had risen from his knees calmly and pa.s.sed into the chapel, which lay between his room and the balcony, in order to see who it could be. For the candles were lit on the Altar and sent a faint light into the vaulted pa.s.sage beyond.

It was as he paused, in pa.s.sing, to do homage to that Bodily Presence upon the Altar, which was ready--as he was in his robes--for the service of love which was to him, as a priest, his duty, as a man a joy unspeakable, that the pistol-shot came clamouring through the arches, followed by those despairing cries.

What they were he could not distinguish, but that they were urgent was unmistakable, and had he been young as he had been on that night long years ago in the balcony above the pale flood of the Tiber, he could not have been quicker to reach the armoury, seize the long rapier, which he had not used, save in play, since those ruffling days in Rome, and run out into the wide, dim pa.s.sage whence the sound had reached him.

None too soon! Someone was already flying down it. He pulled himself up for attack, but the figure ere he could lunge at it was past him, desperate, indifferent, flinging him against the wall as it continued its reckless way to the outer door, where, with swift opening and closing, it disappeared into the crowded courtyard, out of sight--beyond recall!

He stood for a moment, stupefied. What was Roshan Khan doing there? For that faint light from the Altar had given him a glimpse of a familiar, dark face, Roshan Khan's without a doubt!

"Laila! Laila!"

The cry was clearer this time and the blood left his fine old face in sudden doubt as he turned swiftly to his left. Turned, and saw a faint red glow through an arch far down the pa.s.sage.

That was the arch leading down into the balcony that was never lit up--that was never to be lit up because of something that had happened there long ago--because of the something which had _begun_ a tragedy.

Why was it lit up? A stronger fear caught at his heart. Could Laila?--No!--impossible!

He ran on, and the next moment was realizing that some tragedy had _ended_ in that balcony.

But what?

Who was the woman in native dress who stood with a man's arm around her--a man in a scarlet and gold mess jacket? Ah!--that was Captain Dering, undoubtedly. But the woman? The woman in scarlet and gold also--G.o.d in Heaven!--had the dead--

As he stared, the long, supple limbs, so clearly outlined under their cunningly contrived draperies, seemed to lose themselves in the colour, the glitter of rich stuff; one white arm, losing its hold on a cuff of scarlet and gold, swung back helplessly, and Vincent Dering, with a pa.s.sionate entreaty to his darling not to be afraid, to look up, and tell him where she was hurt, sank to one knee the better to support what he held.

And so the face, tilted backwards over his shoulder, came in view.

_Laila!_

For an instant Ninian Bruce stood bewildered. Then all his youth, the pride of birth, the dash, and the fire which had made that youth what it had been, rose up in him. The blood surged back to his face in wild anger, in savage sense of insult, and desire for revenge.

"How dare you!" he cried, clenching his hand on his sword. "You shall answer for this, sir! How do you come to be here, at this time of night, and why?"

Vincent, who at the first word had given a hurried glance to see who the speaker was, then returned to his task with the indifference of one absolutely preoccupied, held up his hand pa.s.sionately against more.

"Don't--and don't preach, for G.o.d's sake, old man!" he cried recklessly. "Come and help, if you like. Some brute--Oh, curse him!

curse him!"

His one trembling hand, for the other was round her, supporting her, was busy with the quaint, jewelled clasps of the scented corselet, which was crimsoning deeper with another dye. "It's too late for preaching," he muttered, half to himself,--"too late! too late!"

The words seemed to stun his hearer into silence. He stood bewildered.

Too late for what?

And now, roused by that pistol-shot also, another old man, who had carefully hidden himself away from the possibility of being found by Roshan Khan, on the rage for an impossible interview; who had counted, with malicious cunning, on the cooling effect of a useless waiting in the garden till dawn should make it necessary for hot-blooded lovers to return to the Fort, stole like a thief to the balcony. What could have happened? The only likely trouble which had occurred to his vast experience had been the possibility of Roshan Khan seeking the interview upstairs. And for that very reason had not he, Akbar Khan, felt it his duty to sleep outside his mistress's door? What more could faithful servitude be expected to do?

But this! What was this? His charge had stolen a march upon him. Old as he was in the care of frail womanhood, he had been imposed upon! Then, as he crept round a pillar craftily, the sight of Pidar Narayan, in his priestly robes, made the old sinner throw up his hands and grovel in the dust.

"This slave knew nothing!" he mumbled, gasping. "This was unknown. And for the other, I told him it was too soon, too soon,--far too soon."

Too soon, and too late! What did it all mean? Father Ninian stood helpless, paralyzed; but Vincent caught at the words.

"The other!" he echoed. "You black devil! who was the other? Who was that man? Curse him!" He paused, for Laila opened her eyes.

"It was Roshan Khan," she said, with a smile, that half-amused, half-mysterious smile. "He gave me the dress, you know, and I think he wanted me--to marry him. Hus.h.!.+ what's the use of being angry--now?" She checked his incredulous outcry, and her hand hesitated up to his trembling fingers, and held them back from their task. "Don't," she went on; "I'd rather--you didn't waste time. I want you to look at me--only me--me, myself. Ah! that's nice!"