Fourteen hours later Richard Morton opened his eyes. He saw a reddish shadow over his head. He lay quite still, and kept on looking into the shadow. Presently he saw that it had concealed an arch of brick, and he began to count the bricks. Some of them were in a disgracefully broken state. When he had counted up to fifteen, it occurred to him that he was very stiff, and he began to stretch out his limbs. He was lying upon something uncommonly hard too. Ah—more bricks, but there was something soft under his head, and, O Lord, yes—his head must have had a pretty hard crack on it to feel like this. He put up a hand and discovered the presence of a bandage. Then a voice said, “Oh, Dick!” and he sat up, leaning on one hand, and holding the other to his head.
The daylight was coming in through three low doors, and just inside the middle one was a woman.
Richard Morton passed his hand across his eyes and stared at her. The woman had a very pale, thin face of an oval shape. Her lips were pale too, but they were firmly cut, and she had eyes that looked black. There were dark lashes over them and dark circles beneath. She wore a native sheet wrapped closely about her body, but the remains of a tattered grey muslin dress showed at breast and ankle. Her arms were bare to the elbow, and she seemed to have been washing her hair, for it hung in damp black curls all about her shoulders. As he stared at her, her face changed. She looked at him as no woman had ever looked at him since his mother died.
“Oh, Dick!” she said again.
Her eyes were full of a mist, and he saw that they were very beautiful eyes, and that they were not black at all, but grey. Richard Morton kept on staring for a moment. Then he sat bolt upright, dug the nails of one hand into the palm of the other, shut his eyes tightly, opened them again, and finding that the woman was still there, he said:
“Where on earth am I?”
The sound of his own voice reassured him a little, but it seemed to alarm the woman.
She came nearer, knelt down upon the brick floor, took hold of his wrist, and began to feel for the pulse.
Richard felt uncommonly like a fool.
“Do tell me where I am,” he urged.
“But I don’t know,” said the woman; “I really wish I did. We ought to know.”
Apparently his pulse pleased her, for she smiled as she let go his hand. When she smiled, Richard saw that she was very much younger than he had thought at first. He liked her face very much.
“Yes, we ought to know,” he said. “But why don’t we?” And the lady shook her hair back and said:
“Because we came here in the night. Don’t you remember at all, Dick? Oh, you had better not try,” she added, as he wrinkled up his forehead, and was reminded of the fact that there was a bandage across it.
“But I do remember,” he began. “Of course I remember everything. Blake and I were together, and his horse went down. I grabbed at him and a great ugly brute hit me over the head.”
Helen began to unfasten the bandage. She kept her hands steady, but her voice shook a little as she asked:
“Where did this happen?”
“Don’t you know?” He looked at her curiously. “Why at Multan, of course.”
Helen cried out. She could not help it. The two scars, the old and the new, swam together before her eyes.
“What is it?” said Richard Morton quickly.
Helen pulled herself together.
“Nothing—oh, nothing—your wound has healed. Fancy already—”
She hardly knew what she was saying, but the “already “brought a gasp of hysterical laughter to her lips—already—and Multan was how many years ago? Seven?
“That was not why you cried out like that,” said Captain Morton. He looked her straight in the face, turning his head to do so, and drawing back against the wall. “It was not anything to do with my wound. You cried out when I said Multan. What has happened? Of course I can see that something has happened. Why are we here? Tell me at once, please.”
Helen put out her hand, and drew it back again. She felt quite dizzy. Then she said in a low voice:
“Multan was seven years ago, Dick.”
There was a long silence.
After a minute or two she replaced the bandage. He could feel how unsteady her fingers were. Yet they moved gently, and never hurt him. When she had finished, he caught her wrists and pulled her round to face him. She met his eyes with a sweet, anxious look. The sweetness and the anxiety were both for him.
“No, you don’t look mad,” he said in a voice he could hardly have known for his own.
Helen began to laugh.
“I should think I must,” she said, catching her breath. “I saw myself in the pool, and I thought that I looked quite mad—you can’t get very tidy without a comb or hairpins. I’m clean though, quite, quite clean, for I’ve washed all my things. There is quite a deep pool in a ravine close by, and there is a sort of cave there too. It might be safer than this.”
Helen was talking to gain time, but Richard did not seem to be listening.
“Am I mad then?” he asked, and though he smiled as he said it, there was trouble in his eyes.
“Oh, no, Dick, how foolish—your head was hurt, and you have forgotten. Grandmamma knew a man that it happened to. He forgot everything—even his name—you haven’t done that.”
“Richard—Vernon—Morton—no, I haven’t done that.”
“You did hurt your head at Multan, you see,” said Helen. “And it happened just in the way you said. Captain Blake told me—not you—you saved his life. That was at Multan, so you see, now that you are wounded in the same place again, it is quite natural that you should get confused.”
“But I am not at all confused. It’s not that. I could understand that. My head is perfectly clear. I could tell you what Blake and I had for dinner last night—only, I suppose it wasn’t last night.”
He broke off, and asked abruptly:
“What is the date?”
“The 30th— yes, it must be the 30th of June, 1857.”
“Seven years.” He put his hand up to his head. “It is inconceivable.”
Then his hand came down and felt his chin—“Lord—what a beard! I was smooth enough yesterday. This is a fortnight’s growth—since yesterday.”
He went off into rather shaky laughter, and Helen looked at him with troubled eyes.
“Don’t think about it. Please don’t,” she said. “It will all come back in time, I am sure it will all come back.” But even as she spoke, it came over her with a rush that she would be glad if it did not come back, if it never came back at all.
“Seven years,” said Richard Morton again, in a dazed sort of way. Then he put his head in his hands, and Helen began to be afraid of her own thoughts.
After a while he looked up.
“How long have you—have I—have we known each other?” he said, and she saw a little glow of colour rise in his cheeks.
“Three years,” said Helen, and she looked at him because she would not let him see her look away.
“Three—then four years are gone altogether; but you can tell me about the last three, at any rate. What have I been doing?”
He watched her face, and saw it change.
“You were in England in ’54,” she said.
No, that brought back nothing, but he could see that she expected it to stir some memory. She kept her eyes upon him, and every moment she thought that memory would wake, and show him Adela, his marriage—all the unhappiness.
“In England? You are sure?”
“Why, yes. Quite sure. We met there, you see.”
Was that what he was expected to remember? His meeting with her?
Richard Morton experienced a strange sensation.
“And then?” he said.
“You returned to India, and went into Civil employ. You were at Peshawur under Colonel Edwardes.”
<
br /> Richard gave a short laugh.
“Good Lord, how queer that sounds. D’ you know I could go into court and swear that Edwardes and I talked for an hour in his tent last night, with the lights of Multan in front of us—big, yellow, winking lights—camp-fires, you know—and Peshawur, you say I was at Peshawur? This isn’t Peshawur?”
“No, we are somewhere near Cawnpore?”
“And why are we here?”
Helen faltered.
“Don’t you remember anything at all, Dick?” she said almost imploringly.
If he had really lost seven years out of his life, then the years of his marriage were gone too. What would that mean? How should she tell him? What should she tell him? He saw her eyes dilate, and the colour just touch her cheek and fade again. Once more that strange sensation awoke in him. This time it brought a hot embarrassment in its train. Who was she, this girl who called him Dick, who looked at him as no one else had ever done? The mist was in her eyes again now. He spoke quickly.
“Who are you?”
“I am Helen.”
It was a relief to have something so easy to answer, but a restless look came into his face.
“You say you have known me for three years. You call me Dick? Then you know me very well. I ought to know you.”
“Yes, you ought to know me,” said Helen, and in spite of herself her eyes fell and her lips trembled a little.
At her words he broke out:
“My dear girl, for Heaven’s sake tell me who you are? Can’t you see what I am wondering?”
Helen saw. A burning blush ran up to the roots of her hair. In a strange confusion of mind she remembered how Adela had told her to learn to blush. Well, she had learned now. That blush seemed to scorch her.
“I am Helen Wilmot,” she said. “And we are friends, Dick.” She kept her head high, but her voice shook.
It was so curious to hear her say his name. He could not remember that any woman had ever called him Dick. It had been Dickie with his mother. Men called him Dick, but never a woman before. He looked at her and could not help seeing her colour, her agitation. She said they were friends, and she called him by an intimate name, and looked at him as if—he caught himself up.
“And do I call you Helen?”
“Of course you do. I suppose it seems strange.”
His eyes twinkled.
“I can bear it, thank you—Helen. Now won’t you tell me what has happened, and how we came here?”
Helen put her hands to her face for a long minute and thought. He had really forgotten.
Those years were gone and all the horrors. How good it was to see any one look cheerful again—really cheerful, not pretending, with a smile that covered a despairing courage. How good it was to see the laughter and the life in his eyes, to see him look like the old Dick. What was she to tell him?
Adela? Her heart seemed to stop. The tears came hot against her fingers, Adela was dead. Poor, poor Adela. She was dead with the others in Cawnpore. Words shaped themselves in the pain and confusion of Helen’s mind: Let the dead bury their dead. They seemed to bring a clearness and a vision.
He had been so ill—and still was weak. If she were to tell him, who knew what might happen. He had been near death—so near that seven years of his life were dead. Why not listen to the floating words? Why not let the dead years bury their dead sorrows, and turn to the living?
If God Himself had blotted memory from Richard’s brain, who was she to bring it back?
The tide of temptation took her off her feet. This was her hour, had it come to her only to be renounced?
With a sudden movement she dropped her hands in her lap and spoke.
And in all she said there was no word of Adela at all.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE DREAM
Over the edge of the world, away from its fear and fret,
We eat the enchanted fruits, we drink the enchanted stream.
We look in each other’s eyes, and what we will, we forget,
And what we will, we remember, till the breaking of the dream.
They moved from the temple that same day, and took up their abode in the cave that Helen had discovered. It was only just large enough to shelter them, but by scraping away the earth at the back, they made it a little larger, and at least it kept the rain out. For now it rained every day and all day, only clearing for an hour or two, usually at sunset. The country paths and tracks rapidly became quite impassable, and stood a foot deep in liquid mud. It was doubtless owing to this fact that no more offerings were brought to Kuanwala’s little temple, though there were, as Richard soon discovered, a couple of villages within three or four miles of it.
The cave was high up in the side of a deep, rocky ravine, down which there poured a torrent of muddy water, drained from the surrounding country. With the moisture, green life sprang everywhere—in the ravine, on the trunks of the trees, about the mouth of the cave.
After three days’ rain, the open plain looked as if some one had drawn a gigantic brushful of green paint across it, leaving here a smudge and there a thin clear wash.
“It looks like a heat haze or thunder clouds turned green,” said Helen. “I don’t believe it’s grass. It’s just part of the dream we are in”; and she laughed.
After a week Helen ceased to be astonished at this transformation of the dry and barren earth, but she had begun to be astonished at the change in herself. Cawnpore seemed to be a hundred years away. She looked back on it through a mist that blurred the details.
Long afterwards the woman who became Helen’s most intimate friend said to her:
“I suppose you can’t speak of it. It was too dreadful.”
And Helen’s answer was a strange one.
“Mary,” she said, “it’s not because it was too dreadful that I can’t speak about it, but because it came not to be dreadful at all—you can’t understand that? Thank God, you can’t. That is what terrifies me when I look back. One got callous, got used to it all. The people who didn’t get used to it lost their reason. I saw things that ought to have killed me, and I didn’t die, and I didn’t go mad. Once Dick was safe, I didn’t even care. That is why I never let myself look back.” Once Dick was safe! There is no one on this earth quite so callous as a woman in love. Half humanity may be blotted from the face of the globe, and she will not care so long as the man she loves is amongst those who are saved.
Richard Morton was very weak for a time, but he was a very hard and healthy man, and he got strong quickly. Helen watched him as a mother watches a child who has been ill. It was just that with her—the protective mother instinct which is behind all a woman’s best love, whether for her child or for her child’s father. To know that he was safe, to see him getting stronger, to be with him, these things filled her consciousness and left no room for any other thought. She would wake half a dozen times in the night and listen to his breathing, until her heart throbbed so loud that she was afraid it would wake him too, and every breath she drew was a breath of thankfulness and praise. The shadow of death lay only a handbreadth from them, but Helen was in the sunshine, and she forgot everything in the joy of its light and warmth.
It was a most precarious sunshine, but they lived in the present. In that present, their most pressing anxiety was for food. At first they ate roots and frogs, which was rather dreadful, but you got used to it.
Richard had a precious box of lucifer matches. It was a metal box, so the matches had kept dry, and they used them in a miserly fashion, and tried to keep a small fire smouldering in a second cave, where they cooked their frogs, and so found it possible to eat them.
“I don’t really think I could eat raw frog,” said Helen, to which Richard responded that you could do most things if you were starving.
He practised diligently with a sling, assuring Helen that he had been a first-class shot wi
th one as a boy. After a couple of days he succeeded in bringing down a good many birds, whereupon they renounced frogs and began to put on flesh. Both pigeons and parrots are excellent eating and very wholesome.
“Helen, you are getting quite fat,” said Richard Morton one day.
There was a definite break in the rains, and they had wandered half a mile up the ravine. Helen sat on a rock at the edge of a deep pool. She leaned over the water, and looked at her reflection.
“I can’t quite count all my bones now,” she said lazily. “I was getting quite good at anatomy, only I didn’t know the names of the things. Now they are all returning decently into private life, and I shall forget them again. One doesn’t want to be the family skeleton, does one? If ever I get too fat, I can always go back to frogs.
I shall write and tell Aunt Harriet about them when we return to civilisation. I shall say, ‘Dear Aunt Harriet, lost waists may be restored in a week, by a diligent diet of batrachians.’ Then she will go and look up batrachians in the dictionary; Aunt Harriet is the sort of person who always keeps one on her writing-table, and refers to it when she writes letters—a dictionary, I mean, not a frog—and then she will never speak to me any more for ever. Then we shall all be quite happy.”
“Shall we? You see I don’t know your Aunt Harriet,” said Richard, laughing.
“Yes, you do. I mean you did.”
Helen’s face clouded, and Richard watched her curiously.
“Did I like her?”
“No, not at all. She isn’t the sort of person one likes. She is a Disagreeable Relation. Worthy, you know, dreadfully worthy, all the unpleasant virtues. Of course, I oughtn’t to say so, but one gets so detached from one’s relations in a jungle.”
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