Devil's Wind

by Patricia Wentworth

  Helen nodded and caught Ernest by the hand.

  The boat which Richard Morton had indicated lay in about three feet of water. It was of rather lighter draught than most of the others. About half a dozen yards separated it from the bank. The shallow waters were full of people by now, and the cool current seemed to give new strength and vigour to the scorched and weary limbs it washed.

  “I want to paddle too. Oh, let me paddle,” cried Lucy, and turned away from Helen, who had scrambled first into the boat, and was holding out dripping hands to take her.

  “The boatmen—why are they all going ashore?” called Lizzie Carthew.

  She stood up in the boat and uttered a piercing scream.

  “Oh! there is a boat on fire—the other boats—they are burning—the thatch is burning. Oh, Captain Morton!”

  As she spoke, Bala, the Nana’s brother, leaned from the temple platform and fired the pistol which he had kept hidden under his shawl. The sharp report hung for a moment upon the air, and the shawl itself, a brilliant scarlet square, patterned in a dozen exquisite shades, fell from Bala’s shoulders, and fluttered down upon the yellow waters below.

  Then with a crash that seemed as if it must dissolve the very heavens in wreck and wrath, the hidden guns broke out, and from behind each patch of grass, each dark tamarisk clump, the liers-in-wait poured upon the helpless English a paralysing hail of lead.

  The wood of the boats was splintered, and the thatch of their roofs broke out in flame. The thick grass along the river’s edge caught alight and the noise of the fire went up to heaven with the crash of the guns, the shattering rattle of musketry, and the wild, agonising screams of those who died in the water and those who died in the fire.

  It was not like the surprise of an ordinary ambush. It did not come with the common shock of war. They had endured all things already—these men, their women and their little children. They had become used to suffering. Nerves, strained to the utmost tension through weeks of fear, had grown numb and unresponsive to any common dread. But this thing came as the lightning might come upon the eyeballs of one half blind. It tore the dimness with a rending flare of horror. It woke the dulled nerves to feel, to suffer, and to agonise afresh. Suddenly, and very terribly, they felt—they saw.

  They saw the house of life shattered, and the streams of life mingled with this yellow river of death. They saw flames that crept and leaped and hissed in the blood of the dying. They saw those red, hissing flames reflected from water that ran horribly, vividly crimson, until between the fire above and the blood below, there came a drifting smother of thick black smoke that was like a horror of darkness made manifest, because the deeds that were done in it were the deeds of that outermost darkness, where there are weeping and gnashing of teeth, the worm that does not die, and the fire that none can quench.

  Helen Wilmot had expected, she knew not what—but when it came her heart seemed to stop beating altogether. Richard thrust the child into her arms, and she crouched there in the forepart of the boat, holding a limp little body that never moved again. She did not know that the child was dead. She did not know where Ernest was. He had been with her in the boat, and then suddenly he was not there any more. She knew nothing, except that this was the end, the very end of all, and that it was dreadful, unexpectedly dreadful, because she must look with her eyes, and see Dick die before she died herself. They had been saved for this, that she might see him die.

  These thoughts passed in her mind instantaneously. They were there as Richard straightened himself after leaning towards her with little dead Lucy in his arms. She saw him turn to Adela, who had fallen on her knees in the stream, and at the same moment he uttered a cry, which she rather felt than heard, and fell across the side of the boat, with the blood streaming from his head. In an instant Helen’s heart began to beat again and she came back to life. She thrust the child aside, and caught him by the arm, but strain as she might, she could not drag him in. He had fallen face downwards and lay across the side of the boat, half out of it and half in, with the lower part of his body in the water. Helen tore the sheet from her shoulders and passed it twice about him, under the armpits. Then she held it tight with both her hands and knelt there waiting for the end. That hour was like one of the hours of Eternity. One hour was all the hours, and all the hours were one.

  There was no time any more. Helen looked through the smoky air and her brain played her a strange trick. She lost all sense of perspective, all sense of distance. Near and far were confounded, and she perceived all these fated and fatal things, all these faces of wrath and fear and vengeance, all these forms distorted by passion and suffering, as if they were ranged in one long, straight line that had no end. For ever afterwards she thought that that was how the nations of men and the untold souls of the dead would appear upon the great Day of Judgment. None before or after another, none greater or less than another, but all equal, all terribly equal, as men are only equal in death or in the eyes of God, who kills and makes alive.

  Helen saw everything after this strange fashion. Bala, dark and fierce, upon the temple platform, seemed as near as poor young Lizzie Carthew, with her dead face only a yard away—as near, and as infinitely far.

  Something which was neither mist nor smoke was between Helen and all that she looked upon. It was like a sheet of impalpable glass. It was like the veil which hangs between the living and the dead. Through its intangible film she heard the screams that were like one long, unending scream. Through it she looked upon terrible and tragic things.

  She saw Mr. Moncrieff, the chaplain, standing with two or three others. He stood deep in the stream, and it eddied about his waist, and he rocked a little as it swayed him. He had a book in his hand. It was a prayer-book, and he turned the pages as if he were in church. When he had found the place that he wanted, he bent his head, and began to read. Helen saw his lips move, and then a mounted sowar came driving through the stream with the water splashing up before him and behind. It made a cloud of spray and foam, and the lifted sabre caught the sunlight very brightly once, and then went down through the cloud into the water, and was dimmed.

  There was a woman clinging to the chaplain’s arm. Helen heard her scream, and then they were all down, and the water was rolling over them and covering them from sight. The trooper’s wild shout rose high above the din as he rode on, and as he rode, he laughed and waved his bare arm, which dripped with blood and water.

  There was less shouting now. The nine-pounders were silent, and the musket men had ceased to fire; but the sandy lane and the landing-place seethed with a wild confusion of murderers and the murdered, and the turbid waters were beaten into red waves as the wild troopers rode their horses into the shallows, slashing and shouting and calling to one another.

  It must have been at this time that desperate hands succeeded in pushing Major Vibart’s boat off the sand-bank into deeper water. With a great jerk it swung round, and that jerk sent Richard Morton slipping back and over the side.

  Helen had braced her muscles for the jolt. She held the sheet desperately, but her hands slipped inch by inch as his weight came heavily and yet more heavily upon them. They were strong hands and there was a frantic courage behind them, but they were only a woman’s hands, and Richard Morton was a heavy man for all his leanness.

  As she knelt there, straining and panting, the boat swung round more and more, and suddenly, as it moved, she caught sight of Adela.

  Adela Morton had remained upon her knees, close under the side of the boat. She seemed to have no power to rise or move, and her eyes stared over the water, and saw it beat against her breast and sometimes rise almost to her chin, yet she never raised herself nor stirred. Now as the boat swung away from her and slid out into the channel, she looked around her like a terrified animal.

  It was at this moment that Helen saw her and called to her loudly:

  “Adie, Adie, come this way!”

 
But Adela stumbled to her feet, blind and deaf with fear. In the wild panic that knows nothing of direction she struggled forward, her wet clothes dragging at her limbs. She felt the ground rise under her feet and gained the shore. Then she screamed and began to run, and as she ran she heard a man shout and laugh, and saw above her head a red sword raised to strike. Helen saw it too. She had called and called with all her strength. She was powerless; she looked and could not turn her eyes away. She saw the sword rise and begin to fall, and then with her own instinctive shudder, the weight upon her hands slipped lower, and in an instant she forgot Adela and looked to see the water come up against Dick’s shoulders, against his chin, against his mouth. His head had fallen back, and the stream seemed to be drawing and pulling it under.

  Then Helen cried aloud. They had drifted out into the open channel, a little away from the confusion, and there was something in that cry of hers that rose above the other sounds of misery. She cried again and again, and two men crawled out from under the thatch and stared at her in amazement.

  “What are you doing?” said one.

  “Help me! Help me to pull him in!” gasped Helen.

  The second man drew Lizzie Carthew’s body out of the way and looked over the side.

  “He’s dead!” he exclaimed.

  “No, no. Pull him in—for God’s sake—for God’s sake.”

  “We’ve no room for dead men,” said the first man, not brutally, but as one who states a fact.

  Helen turned her white face, with its terrible blazing eyes, upon him. They were like darkness with a flame in it.

  “Help me,” she said, and as she spoke she felt the sheet slip a little more. Then she looked back to the river, and saw the awful tinged water flowing like death itself between her and Dick. His face looked through it—his dead face. It sank lower and it was as if the whole world slipped away from her with it, leaving her unimaginably alone in a space where neither God nor man would ever come. Her anguish broke from her in another cry, not loud, but so bitter, so full of misery, that the second man stretched down and caught at the sheet.

  “But he’s dead,” he said, yet he pulled strongly.

  As he pulled Helen saw the veil of the water grow thin and part, giving Dick back to her again, and her soul came back with a rush from that strange lonely place.

  The two men pulled Richard Morton in and lifted him on board. He lay there with his head on Helen’s lap, and Helen bent above him and tore a strip from the sheet to bind the wound on his head. It was a long, ragged tear, and it crossed the line of an old, deep scar.

  “What’s the good o’ that to a dead man?” grumbled the man who had lifted him over the side; but Helen made no answer. She had felt the little pulse that beats in the temple; she had felt it throb as she touched him on the brow, and every pulse in her own body answered it.

  CHAPTER XX

  THE STAYING OF THE SWORD

  If thou take oath in a matter, and thou presently break thine oath,

  Thou shalt pay thy dues to the Brahmin and he shall pronounce thee clean.

  But if thou have sworn by the Ganges, then the most high Gods are wroth,

  And all the waters of Ganges, they shall not purge thy sin.

  Sereek Dhundoo Punth was alone in his tent. The door hangings were drawn aside and the early morning light stole past them. It took a reddish tinge from their rich colour, and struck upwards faintly, losing itself by degrees in the orange-coloured dusk that filled the upper part of the tent.

  There was no one before the doorway, which framed a rectangular patch of dusty ground. A man walking to and fro inside the tent would have nothing else before his eyes. Dhundoo Punth had sent his servants away. He wished to be alone and he walked to and fro continually.

  When he looked towards the tent door he saw that empty, dusty space with the pale, hot sunshine on it, and when he looked down at his feet he saw the same sunshine lying in a square upon the carpet and striking all the colours of the seven great jewels from its dyes—sapphire, emerald, turquoise, topaz, amethyst, pearl, and ruby.

  The colours flashed as he paced to and fro, but the red of the ruby prevailed. It spread and spread until it swallowed all the rest, and the ground tone of the silken carpet swam before his staring eyes, until it seemed as if he walked in a bloody mist that rose about his feet.

  Up and down walked Dhundoo Punth, and the muslin of his thin garments was damp with sweat.

  He was listening, listening intently, and the strained nerve throbbed to sounds that were only counterfeit and not real at all—the roar of guns, the clamour of many voices and a noise of groaning that burdened the heavy air.

  Suddenly the sound of a horse galloping came to him sharp and distinct. This was a real sound, and it relieved the tension. It came on, faster and faster, then stopped, and on the instant a man covered with dust broke in upon the Nana’s solitude, a man whose face was so pale that it seemed as if the dark pigment had been driven from it by sheer horror.

  It was Francis Manners, called the Rao Sahib. He came in panting, crying out, “My uncle—my uncle!” and the Nana stood aghast with the sweat on his face. What had chanced? What had befallen? Were broken oaths so quickly heard, so quickly punished by the high gods?

  “What is it? Speak!” he stammered, and the young man moistened his pale lips and threw out his hands.

  “They kill every one. Is this your oath? All the women—all the children—and she is there—Adela. They said she lived. Is this your order? It is not to be borne. Is it your order? Is it your order, my uncle?”

  Dhundoo Punth looked at him with his wild, brilliant eyes. They had the same eyes, these two, and in each there was a spark that might blaze some day in madness. The Nana frowned, drawing his brows close.

  “It is Bala. It is Tantia,” he exclaimed. “Ai, Bala, my brother, you are not master yet!”

  He broke into a fury and cursed, striding up and down, a terrible, unwieldy figure that seemed to fill the tent. His face was convulsed. Fear and rage looked out of his restless eyes. Suddenly he stood still.

  “Go back, and take them an order,” he said. “Take them an order from me, from their lord. To-morrow I shall be Peishwa. It is not Bala who shall sit upon the throne. It is not Bala who is lord. The women are to be saved, and the children. They are to be saved and brought to me here—to the Savada house. As for the woman you desire, take her. What is that to me? The men I have given to the army. In a month they could not take them. Then I spoke. Then I made my plan. I gave them these men who are as brave as devils, whom they could not subdue, no, not with all their force. I gave them into their hands. Let them be content. Take my order to them. Show them my ring. Tell them it is their master who speaks. Tell them to obey. If any one will not obey, he shall be blown from a gun. Yes, if it were Tantia himself, or Bala, my brother. These are my words.”

  He pulled at his finger and dragged off the ring in which the great ruby shone so red, and the Rao Sahib took it and went out quickly, like a man pursued, and again the sound of galloping hoofs came back to the Nana as he paced back and forth across the sunlit patch upon the ground.

  Down at the ghaut the bodies lay piled, one on the other, the dying with the dead. Far down, far down the stream the shuddering villagers turned from the sacred water and said tremblingly:

  “We cannot drink of it; we cannot look upon it.”

  Here by the landing-stage, the burning thatch smouldered away and the firing and the shouting died.

  As the Rao Sahib came down the ravine, riding furiously, the lightest of the boats swung out into the deeper channel. One of those who pushed her off was Captain Moore, and as he pushed he fell, shot through the heart and the waters of the Ganges closed over him. At the same moment the Rao Sahib saw a woman who had been crouching in the water spring up and falter blindly towards the shore. She had a grey felt hat upon her head, but as she ran it fell o
ff and he saw her hair—her floating chestnut hair. The sun shone on it and on her face distorted with terror. She came stumbling to the shore with the water splashing about her, dragging her back, and as she gained the sand a sowar rode pelting up behind with his sword raised and a shout of “Maro—maro—kill—kill—kill.”

  The Rao Sahib spurred forward. He too shouted, and as he reached the water’s edge and reined in his horse the woman flung herself against the animal’s shoulder and gripped the saddle-cloth, pressing blindly against the warm heaving life, as if it could screen her from the sword which she had seen raised up and ready to strike.

  In every quivering limb she felt the thrust of it already, along each shrinking nerve there ran the anticipated anguish. But the trooper rode past with a shout,

  “Victory to the Maharaja!” he cried and galloped on, raising his dripping sword in a salute as he passed his master’s nephew. The Rao Sahib looked down and the woman looked up. On the hot air between them memory flung its strange mirage. Both saw the green of springing plants and the cool gleam of a sleeping pool. A woman stood by the pool and smiled. There were crimson flowers at her white bosom and in her white dress. There was a man who caught her dress and groaned.

  The air trembled and gave up its vision. The past was gone and the dead years were dead.

  Here was a woman with lips that had forgotten how to smile. Her dress was white no more, and the red that stained it was not the red of flowers.

  Her hands caught at the man’s garments. Her eyes held the extremity of terror as she raised them.

  Francis Manners and Adela Morton recognised each other.

  CHAPTER XXI

  THROUGH THE WIND

  Death has brought me alone, to a dim and terrible place.

  I have forgotten Sun and Star.

  I cannot see.

  The darkness is all around me, the darkness covers my face.

  This is no land where the living are. Let me go free.