Devil's Wind

by Patricia Wentworth

  A day, and a night, and the hours of another day.

  Major Vibart’s boat still floated. She had always drawn less water than the other boats, and now she was lighter than she had been, for many who had set out in her were dead, and the dead had been thrown overboard. The thatched roof was gone. During the night, arrows, weighted with blazing charcoal, had been showered upon it until it caught fire and had to be thrown over into the river.

  Those who remained alive were now quite without shelter from the sun or the enemy’s fire. They were oarless and rudderless; they had no food to eat, and their drink was the water of the river into which they threw the dead.

  The winding channel had brought them to Nuzzufghar, twelve miles from Cawnpore. Of the times they had struck the shelving shore, of the times they had swung in the slow current and borne down upon some hidden sand-bank, of the hail of bullets by day and the blazing arrows that fell at night, there is no space to tell.

  They drifted inshore near Nuzzufghar under a deadly fire, and then the rain came down upon them so heavily that it made a truce.

  At sunset there came a boat from Cawnpore, full of armed men, but they too ran upon a sandbank, and the little desperate band of Englishmen fell upon them and destroyed them. Then the sun went down, the rain ceased, and it was night. No efforts would stir the grounded boat, she lay heavily in the shallows, and her occupants lay down to sleep wearily and without a hope in the world.

  Helen Wilmot was still in the stern of the boat. The bullets had passed her by, and she was unwounded. By her side was a man who never lifted his eyes, but sat staring and muttering. Sometimes she gave him water, and he drank it without looking at her. Sometimes she broke a piece of native bread and put it to his lips. She had saved it in the entrenchment that the children might have food after their walk to the boats, and she kept it hidden, taking a mouthful now and then, and feeding the man beside her who ate and fell again into his rambling talk, of which she could not understand a single word.

  The man was Richard Morton.

  After lying unconscious for hours, he had awakened into this half-delirious state. He had no fever, but his mind wandered, and Helen watched him continuously with a heart-break in her eyes. The rain had ceased, the sunset had gone out like a quenched torch, and the darkness of a heavily-clouded night came down. The men and women in the boat slept. There was no hope to trouble them now. They were too weary to care whether they lived or died, and too faint to keep wake any longer. Crouching or lying one against the other, they slept, huddled up in one common misery, beneath the blanket of the dark.

  Helen Wilmot woke suddenly.

  Her sleep had been dreamless, or rather her dream had been of the vague empty places beyond the reach of thought. White formless mist pressed in upon her brain. Closer and closer, nearer and nearer it came, bringing nothingness, annihilation—the end. Then, to the sound of a sharp cry of agony it was gone. Her eyes opened and saw the dead blackness of night stretched like an impenetrable curtain between the invisible heaven and the dark invisible earth. Some one had called her she thought. Some one had called her name—not Helen, but her own name—the essential name which she had had from the very beginning. Dick—was it Dick who had called? She sat up. Her shoulder was very stiff and her arm was numb.

  The side of the boat was so hard. But her shoulder had been against Dick’s shoulder when she dropped asleep, her arm had touched his and her hand had clasped his hand.

  She slipped her hand along the edge of the boat and touched nothing but the splintered wood. Richard Morton’s place was empty. Helen rose upon her knees and began to grope in the darkness. She touched a woman’s dress and a child’s hair. She touched a face which was cold and did not shrink, though her fingers brushed across the open eyes.

  Helen’s own hand was as cold. A numbness ran up from that cold face and dulled the pulsing of her heart as she forced her stiff fingers to feel for the bandage and the scar which must be there if this were Dick—if it were Dick who had died whilst she was sleeping. There was no scar, no bandage. All at once she conceived a stark horror of the dead man whose face was so near to hers as she leaned above him in the gloom. She drew away with a shudder, and the blood ran tingling back into her finger-tips. It was at this moment that she heard something moving in the water with a slow, careful movement. She strained her eyes, but she could see nothing, the darkness was so sheer. Only through it came that lapping, whispering sound, growing fainter and fainter as she listened for it. A man wading very carefully and cautiously would make just such a sound.

  “Dick,” said Helen in the quick whisper that will carry farther than a louder tone.

  There was no answer. A quick gusty breath came ruffling up the stream. As it did so Helen heard a little gurgling splash farther, much farther, away, and on the impulse she took the sheet from about her shoulders, swathed it tightly round her body, fastening it with the strong brooch from her throat. Then she slipped over the edge of the boat where the wood had splintered away, leaving a gap, and felt the water rise cold in the darkness until it lay about her waist, chill and close. She moved forward half a dozen paces, with a slow wading motion. The cold edge of the water ran up a little higher and fell back again as she moved. It felt like a sharp edge of steel pressing upon the heart. Again she heard a faint splash, and again moved on, and the current of the deepening stream beat hard against her breast till her heart answered it.

  She had lost her sense of direction then in the black gloom, and could not tell which way the boat lay or where was the shore. Out here in the deep channel the river seemed full of strange sounds. Ripple answered ripple and the wind stirred the night into broken speech.

  The wind rose momentarily and brought with it the smell of wet earth and the noise of the whispering of trees. To Helen, these land scents and land noises brought a sudden overwhelming horror of the river and the brooding dark. The chill about her struck inwards, and with an increasing tremor she remembered the guardians of the stream, the alligators who haunt the fords and the shallows of the Ganges. She had seen one only a few hours before, and as it moved in the water, the long ripple that followed it had made just such a sound as the one which had brought her here.

  She stood quite still and did not dare to stir, and then again something moved in the water and she pressed forward without knowing whether she was going towards the sound or away. Almost immediately the shelving sand drift rose beneath her feet. Trembling and shivering, she came up the bank and stood there wringing out her drenched skirt and wondering where she was and what she was to do. As she wondered, the wind took her loosened hair and drove it across her eyes. It was like a bandage over them, and she pushed it back, looking and listening, straining eyes and ears, straining and straining still. Through the deep continuous murmur of the wind, she heard the sound that a dog makes when he shakes himself free of the wet in his coat. It was quite close, and she ran forward and struck against something that moved, but which she could not see. There was a moment of sheer dread. Then her hand touched another hand, and it was one she would have known for Richard Morton’s, even upon the edge of death.

  “Dick, come back. What are you doing here?” she said, in a low insistent voice, but he shook himself again, roughly, and moved away from her.

  “Dick,” said Helen. “Oh, Dick!”

  She caught his arm and moved with him, and then quite suddenly, the murmur of the wind rose into a loud whirling roar and the air was beaten down to the earth by the torrents of the rain.

  Helen’s voice was gone in the noise and the pelting rush of wind and water. Her lungs laboured for breath, bare breath, but she kept her desperate hold of Richard Morton’s arm, and her feet stumbled after him along some path that she could not see at all.

  But Richard Morton walked as if he saw. He went steadily forward, and seemed neither to know fatigue nor to be aware of Helen’s presence. Once she lost her grip of him, and a t
error of the night came over her so that she cried aloud. The wind carried away her cry, swelling it, but the next gust drove her against him in the darkness, and she clung very close to his arm and did not lose her hold again. He noticed neither her coming nor her going, but held on his way without a pause.

  The tempest filled all the black vault of heaven with its clamorous outcry. It beat about their heads with its strong, invisible wings, and the great gusts of it caught them and drove them forward, so that sometimes they ran and scarcely felt the ground, whilst before them stretched a darkness that wavered in the wind.

  Once when the breath of the storm failed between two shattering buffets, Helen heard Dick’s voice. There were no words, only a wild, strange utterance that seemed to answer the wind. Once when a long pale tongue of lightning leaped from cloud to surging cloud, she caught a glimpse of his face. It was burning white, and his eyes burned too. They looked at the lightning and never shrank or closed.

  A strange exhilaration came upon Helen. It seemed to pass into her from Dick, like a current flowing between them. This rain was the water of their cleansing. It fell from heaven and washed them free from memory. The stains of horror and the taint of blood, the touch of pain and the brand of agony, all vanished, all dissolved, and went down in dew to the earth which is man’s grave, and the wind blew upon them and made them strong. It came leaping from the uttermost part of heaven, and the breath of it beat on their souls like the breath of life.

  That which was washed was also strengthened, and in that strength they ran and were not weary, they walked and were not faint. Of the path they followed and the way they took, Helen knew nothing at all.

  Consciousness was extraordinarily heightened, sensation extraordinarily vivid. Sometimes the clashing trees beat out the music of a march for them. Sometimes the wind blew a trumpet call in their ears. Sometimes their feet were among stones and rough places, and once they went down, down in the darkness into some ravine where water dashed from rock to rock, and then again they climbed and Helen caught her dress and tore it from hem to waist upon some thorny bush. The flesh of her bare ankle was torn too, and a sharp pain shot through her as the hot blood ran down and was chilled by the rain. But they went on and on, and farther on, and never slackened nor stayed at all.

  It was stranger than any dream. The black midnight watched them, and time and again the lightning came out of its secret place and flared across their way, but they saw no human soul and were seen by none. It was a night for closed doors and fastened latch. Men did not come abroad, and even the beasts crouched low. And whenever the hurricane paused between two of its mighty breaths, the darkness was filled and whitened by a rain that stretched unbroken between flooded earth and streaming sky. Then the liquid mud rose about their ankles and clogged their path, and again the wind would break upon the water and cast it in broken gouts far out above the straining trees.

  In the hour before the dawn a grey pallor changed the face of the sky. The wind swept the clouds into a heap and left them, like a pyre that waits the torch. Suddenly the storm dropped. The wind’s breath failed like the breath of a dying man. The rain ceased.

  Richard Morton slackened his pace and stood still. Dim stretches of sodden ground lay before them. Farther on, dark trees. Farther still, darkness itself.

  It was Helen who moved.

  She drew Richard with her and he yielded to her touch, and came haltingly. Slower and slower they moved. The light that filtered through the clouds showed feet that stumbled, scarcely serving to tread another pace.

  Grey changed to silver in the east and silver kindled into gold. The sun’s flame struck upon the piled-up clouds and they sent up a flare of orange, shot with tongues of scarlet fire. Helen and Richard stood amongst the trees and saw facing them a small brick temple, with three doors to it.

  They came to it swaying upon their feet. In the middle of the brick floor there was a tiny well, for this was a temple to Kuanwala, the spirit of wells, he who frightens the children, and brings misfortune, unless he is propitiated with an offering of food. Such an offering lay

  upon the rim of the well now. Flat cakes of wheat flour and a heap of soft-boiled rice.

  Helen rallied the last of her consciousness and filled Dick’s hands with the food. Half swooning they ate, and when they had eaten they crouched down, and the deep, deep sleep of exhaustion came heavily upon mind and body.

  CHAPTER XXII

  THE TWO SCARS

  Let be the past of Shadow, let be the past of Pain,

  Are we to squander the gold of our Youth for what is not?

  Now we are come from the darkness into the light again,

  Is death to be remembered and Life to be forgot?

  Helen Wilmot slept for nearly twelve hours. When she awoke the shadows of the trees were lengthening towards the east. It was already dusk in the little temple. Outside, birds were chattering as they do at sunset all the world over. Helen sat up, and found that her clothes had dried upon her whilst she slept. She had a vague recollection of heat—of the sun upon her stiff limbs. They were very stiff. She was unutterably weary, and her joints ached.

  Richard Morton was lying on his back about a yard away. Helen crawled to his side. The light came through the middle door of the temple and fell upon his face, and she was frightened at the look of exhaustion which it showed. The sunburn was like a brown film over its pallor, there were deep hollows beneath the closed eyes, and his hand when she touched it was chill and clammy. His breath came very slowly and his lips were dry. Water—there should be plenty of water after last night’s rain. Helen limped to the temple door, and looked about her. To the right, the stony ground fell away into a hollow, shaded by a tree that had big, twisted roots. There was a little pool there, and another beyond, larger and deeper.

  Helen crumpled up a corner of the linen sheet which was wrapped about her, soaked it in the nearer pool, and then ran back and squeezed the moisture on to Dick’s parched lips. Her own were almost as dry, but she did not know it until she saw him suck at the wet cloth and felt the water upon her hand. Then her tongue seemed like a cinder in her mouth, but she went on squeezing steadily until all the water was gone, and Richard Morton muttered, opened blank eyes for a moment, and then fell again into an exhausted sleep.

  Helen went again to the pool. This time she drank herself, and bathed her temples. Then she came back and looked at Dick, touching him to make sure that his clothing was dry, and that this was only sleep which held him. It was food he needed. She knew that very well. She looked at the dry chupatti on the well’s edge, at the few grains of rice which they had left beside it. She tried to get some of the rice between Dick’s lips, but he only muttered and turned his head, and she abandoned the attempt. A terror of the coming night seized her. All those hours and hours of darkness, and Dick must have nourishment, or this sleep of his would pass into the final sleep of all. She watched his grey face in the grey twilight until she dared not watch any more. Then she went back to the temple door and crouched there, looking about her in a dazed fashion for some help, some hope.

  The birds were making so much noise that she found it hard to think, or to collect her thoughts. The thoughts fluttered in her brain as the birds fluttered in the branches. They seemed to have a life of their own, and not to be under her own control any more.

  Sometimes they rose about her with a whirring noise; then she found it hard to decide which were her thoughts, and which were the fluttering birds. At last she discovered that her thoughts were grey and dull, but the birds were vivid and gay. They were parrots. There were a whole troop of them, small and brilliant and loud of voice. Once, half a dozen flashed from one tree to another, and a slanting beam of sunlight set their wings ablaze with emerald and sapphire, until the thread of light seemed strung with jewels. Then the shadows swallowed them up, and only their loud, harsh talk came down to Helen, and beat against the confusion of her brai
n. She listened to it, and through it she listened for Dick’s breathing, and thought that it grew fainter.

  Helen sat very still, and the shadows of the temple covered her from head to foot, but a yard or two away the sunset light touched the damp earth, and showed a white speck or two of rice which had fallen from her dress as she came to the doorway. Suddenly there was a stir of beating wings. Two of the little green parrots came down with a whirr, quarrelling, striking at one another, greedy, curious, angry.

  Helen drew in her breath. She became conscious that her right hand was resting on a piece of broken brick. She had been leaning hard upon it, letting the sharp edge cut her palm, because the pain eased her heart a little.

  Now she withdrew her weight, and with a swift instinctive movement with which her consciousness had no concern, she flung out her hand with the brick in it, and let go. There was a quick outcry and an uprushing of bright wings, but only one of the birds had flown away. The other lay half-stunned, with a broken wing, and in an instant she had it fluttering in her hands. Helen had never killed anything in all her life before, but her hands were quick and strong enough to kill now. She felt the short struggle of the terrified creature, she felt its heart fail under her hand. Half a dozen sharp little hammer strokes, that tingled all through her, and then it was dead, a limp warm handful of emerald feathers.

  Helen looked at it stupidly, and then remembered that Dick had a knife. It was hung about his neck on a strong cord. She remembered how he had cut a soldier for Lucy out of a splinter of wood. It seemed a very long time ago.

  She turned with the bird in her hand and went into the temple. Half an hour later she came out into the dusk again, and went down to the pool. She was trembling all over, but Dick was fed, and sleeping as people sleep when they are going to wake again. Helen’s hands were red, because she had to grind the bird’s raw flesh between two stones. Then she had moistened it to a pulp with water, and forced it between Dick’s lips. It had been rather horrible, but after the first he had taken all that she gave him. Now she rubbed her hands in the mud, and then washed them clean. She was glad that it was getting dark, so that she could not see. She had a dreadful feeling that her hands were still red, still stained with blood. O God, there had been so much blood—so much agony. Strange, that after all the horrors of Cawnpore, she should feel like a murderess because she had killed a bird. And she was so weary, so unutterably weary. She drank deep of the first pool, then forced herself to eat some of the stale chupatti, and again sleep came upon her.