by Maud Diver
CHAPTER XXV.
"In a hundred ages of the gods I could not tell thee of the glory ofHimachal. As the dew is dried up by the sun, so are the sins ofmankind, by the glory of Himachal."--_From the Hindu_.
That night Eldred Lenox slept long, and dreamlessly; and awoke with newlife throbbing in his veins. The three uneventful days that followedwere among the happiest in his life; and on the fourth, before sunset,the two women set out, in hospital doolies, on their primitive journeyto Sheik Budeen.
Honor had protested, almost to tears, at being compelled to spend afortnight with her heart in two places, and her body in a third! ButDesmond, reinforced by John Meredith, had held his own; promising toescort her to the barren Rock of Refuge, whose only virtue was itselevation; and, by arranging a relay of ponies along the route, gallopback in time for 'orderly room' next morning. "Which is more than ninehusbands out of ten would do for a headstrong wife!" Meredith hadconcluded, stroking her flushed cheek: and thus the matter had beensettled.
Lenox and Quita spent the last afternoon together in their ownbungalow, at her suggestion. The officious chowkidar unearthed twopunkah coolies for the occasion: and the planning of their future home,a picnic tea served on Eldred's writing-table, and practicalconsiderations in respect of furniture and house linen--though Quitahad small inherent regard for either!--helped, more or less, to obscurethe thought of separation. Before leaving the bungalow, she wonthrough the dreaded last injunctions and kisses without ignominiouscollapse, since Lenox was to ride out for a few miles beside thedoolie; and they parted finally with brave words, and a prolongedhand-clasp that left her fingers tingling for a good five minutesafterwards.
Quita never forgot that journey. Its weird fascination, clashing withthe ache of parting, stamped every detail indelibly upon hermemory;--the vast, featureless plain, empty as a widow's heart; thelavish moonlight poured out upon it like water, flowing unhindered tothe naked spurs of the frontier hills, whose huge shoulders, peaks, andescarpments blotted out the stars along the western horizon; theoccasional appearance of wild-looking Waziri militia-men, from thechain of outposts along the foothills, who had been warned to keep up asharp look-out along the road: no villages; no trees; no sound ormovement anywhere, save the distorted shadows and rythmical grunting ofher doolie-bearers, the soft shuffling of their feet, and the click ofhoofs, as Desmond rode at a foot's pace beside his wife, ordismounting, walked and talked with her, his bridle slung over his arm.
The suggestion of tenderness and companionship in their low tonesseemed to accentuate the lifeless desolation through which they moved,the blankness and uncertainty of the anxious months ahead. Possiblysomething of this occurred to Desmond; for after the first few miles hedeserted his wife now and again, and walked by Quita; exorcising thespirit of self-torment that haunts the imaginative, as he of all menbest knew how to do.
Finally, lulled by the movement of the doolie, she fell asleep; andawoke to find herself in a changed world; a world of rough-cut volcanicrock and boulder, piled up on either hand in fantastic disarray; aworld of white light and sharp black shadows; of mystery, and terror,and uncanny beauty. It was as if she had been transported back to themorning of Time, when the earth giants wrenched up the mountains, andpelted one another in pure sport: and as she flung back the loose flapof her doolie to get a wider view of it all, Desmond trotted up to her.
"It's less alarming than it looks," he reassured her. "We have onlyturned off into the Paizu Pass. It's a nasty dangerous bit of road;but our own men are on ahead, so we're safe enough. We shall beclimbing the hill directly; and I'll be uncommonly glad of my _chotahazri_."
"You deserve it, you poor fellow! But it sounds an anachronism! Ican't believe that anything so commonplace as a bungalow, with servantsand tea and toast, exists within a hundred miles of this primevalnakedness."
But in the fulness of time, bungalow, tea, and servants were allforthcoming: and between three and four of the morning their fantasticjourney culminated in a prosaic meal of eggs and buttered toast. Whenit was over Quita vanished, leaving Desmond alone with his wife; andbefore moonset he was speeding back along the road they had come;covering the fifty miles at a hand-gallop, in something less than fivehours.
A fortnight later two very unwilling grass-widows were rescued byLenox, who had secured his sick leave; and who escorted them from DeraIshmael as far as Lahore, where he left them to go on into the mountainregion beyond Kashmir.
Hillmen have a saying, 'Who goes to the hills goes to his mother'; andEldred Lenox, a hillman both by love and lineage, confirmed it for thehundredth time, as he pushed his way upward, by leisurely enchantingstages, from the steaming Punjab, through the great natural gateway ofthe Baramullah Pass, a towering defile, thunderous with full-fedtorrents and waterfalls, into the familiar Valley, . . a very sanctuaryof peace; its terraced slopes splashed with the vivid green ofrice-fields, the russet and gold of ripe orchards and cornlands; upthrough Srinagar, 'the City of the Sun,' of carved and gilded temples,thronged waterways, and flat house-tops blazoned with flowers; and yetagain upward, by ways well known to him, into the hidden mysteries ofthe mountains massed about the valleys; a mighty conclave of immortalsbrooding in majestic meditation; shrouded at this season by dazzlingcontinents of cloud; and plunging green arms to the rivers and lakes,that gleamed like molten silver under a pale sky.
To know a character rightly it should be seen in its natural element;and the Lenox of the Himalayas was by no means the same man as theLenox of the Plains. All his latent energy and vigour blossomed outlike flowers at the first whisper of spring. 'The glory of Himachal'drew and penetrated and inspired him like nothing else on earth.
Here he tracked and brought down oonyal, markhor, and the greatmountain sheep; explored on a small scale, because the fever of goingwas upon him; and slept as a man only sleeps when he is living close tothe heart of Nature. Here, also,--fortified by solitude, by theuplifting sense of things awful and divine which is the gift of greatmountains to those who love them,--he fought doggedly andsystematically against a craving that persisted in spite of improvedhealth. For the tyranny of opium is as tenacious as it is deadly; andthe habit of five years is not to be broken in as many weeks. But theman who wills to conquer evil has God and Nature fighting on his side:and in the teeth of several flagrant lapses, Lenox made steady progress.
In Srinagar he bought a bottle of chlorodyne; and two days later flungit down the _khud_. When his store of drugged tobacco ran out, hereplaced it by a brand in which an innocuous admixture of opium justsufficed to produce the faint fragrance that he loved. The black fitsof melancholy, which were native to his temperament, and which, in thepast five years, had threatened to dominate him permanently, evaporatedlike morning fogs before the sun as the certainty grew in him that hemust prevail: and Quita, who had done most of the harm, madeunconscious reparation by letters whose consummate faith in the finalissue was stimulating as the mountain air itself.
By October he was back at Dera Ishmael Khan;--a renewed man, bronzedand vigorous, the shadow gone from his eyes; testing his achievementand finding that it held good; bending all his energies to the task offitting up a home for his wife; a task whereof Honor usurped as large ashare as he would permit. Then, towards the end of the month, he wroteto Quita: "Come. We are ready, and waiting for you,--the house,Zyarulla, Brutus, and your impatient husband, who will pick you up atLahore."
And on the last day of October, more than six years after their hastywedding, Eldred and Quita Lenox entered upon their married life.
"Have you forgotten, darling, the nonsense I talked that day about theHouse, and the Enchanted Palace?" she asked, as they stood together ontheir first evening in the drawing-room, whose every detail he hadplanned with elaborate care.
"Is it likely? Why?"
His arm was round her shoulders; and putting up one hand she touchedhis face.
"Why . . because I said we would have to begin with the House. But weseem to have reached
the Enchanted Palace before starting after all?"
"By a very roundabout route," he answered, a suspicion of the oldsadness in his eyes.
"Yes; but we _have_ reached it. That's the main point, dear Pessimist;and the commonplace House I offered you has tumbled into a dust-heap ofruins. Don't let's build it up again, whatever else we may do in theway of foolishness. Retrogression is the one unforgiveable sin!"
It is the instinctive cry of love in the first flush of fulfilment.The grand impulsion of man to woman brushes aside lesser considerationslike so many flies. But Life and Temperament, standing discreetly inthe background, will have their say in the 'fateful second act' of thehuman comedy before the curtain drops.