“Shut your mouth!” roared Jell, flinging himself up into a sitting position on his cot, his face alternately white with anger and red with shame that his secret was so thoroughly laid bare. “You’re talkin’ like a bloomin’ mad fool. An’, anyway, don’t you get using her name so handy, or there’ll be ructions between you and me!”
“Sorry, old pal,” said the little man, in a voice that was suddenly quiet. “I never meant no ’arm. All the same, if you’re feelin’ huffy, don’t make no mistake, I’m your man, gloves or fisties. Just say so plain out, that’s all, old friend.”
“That’s all right, Tripe,” said Murphy. “You got plenty of pluck. Only don’t talk like you been doin’. I’m kind of crotchy these last days, with the heat an’ not sleepin’.”
IV
The singing lessons were continued; for Lady Mary had suggested the possibility of a duet together, which was to be sprung on the audience quite as an extra. She had no definite intention of singing it when the time came, though, equally, she was quite capable of doing so, if still in the mood. Meanwhile, there was a piquancy about these little informal singing lessons with the great sapper.
“Have you ever been in love, Mr. Murphy?” she asked him at one of their lessons. “You sing like a lover, you know. So many men are hopelessly flat in a love song.”
“I’m in love now,” said Murphy, surprising himself with the unexpected words. But Lady Mary laughed musically down at the keyboard.
“How nice that sounds,” she said. “I like to find a man who’s not ashamed of being natural.”
She glanced up swiftly, just a flash of her eyes across his, and thrilled with the passion that glowed in him, all pent up, yet seeming on the point of leaping. She had never before fitted herself into quite so interesting a situation. The very restraint of so forceful a masculine as this big fighting man stirred her in a score of vague and hidden ways.
Abruptly, she remembered Captain Harrison. Undoubtedly she loved Tom Harrison; she had gone to the extent of admitting as much frankly to herself. Tom was just a “lovely fine man,” and she dwelt a moment on his memory, her fingers picking out odd harmonies. With the thought of Tom, she checked the tendency to lead the sapper any nearer to the snapping point of his restraint; and when next she glanced up at him it was with eyes that were speculative and almost cold.
“My sister tells me that Maggie, her maid, and you are very fond of each other.”
Murphy made a gigantic, dumb gesture of denial; but she continued, remorseless.
“I’m very glad,” she said quietly. “Maggie seems a thoroughly nice girl.” And then, as he would have disclaimed verbally so soon as the right words arranged themselves, she glanced at her watch and stood up. “I’m .afraid I must go now,” she said. “Thank you so much for coming!”
She held out her hand. As she did so, unfortunately, she allowed her glance to meet his, and felt herself sway mentally and physically to the dominant force of him. Before she knew what he was doing, he had knelt down on one knee and kissed her hand with all the strange reverence that a good man feels when love comes truly. Then, rising swiftly, he turned and walked out, without a word, leaving her standing, her heart thudding strangely, and the hand that he had kissed still held out loosely in front of her.
“Oh!” she said, almost “with a gasp, after nearly a minute of silence; and went quickly to her own room; for she wanted to analyse her sensations.
V
“Kind, kind and gentle is she—
Kind is my Mary…”
Tripe was coming up from the canteen that evening, when he caught the words of the song that he was growing to hate. A few moments later he met Murphy himself in a bend of the path, where three lonely sycamores made a kind of natural bower. It was plain to the little man that Jell had been walking up and down there by himself, thinking and singing, and, as Tripe would have put it, “generally carryin’ on damn silly!”
“There you are, singin’ that bloomin’ thing again!” said Tripe irritably.
He had received about his twentieth rebuff from Maggie that same evening, and had tried the canteen to ease his feelings. Thus, maybe, he was a little less careful of his words than he might have been.
“Why the ’ell,” he continued, “you make such a blimey fool of yourself, I carn’t think!” Then, with a sudden leaping up of all that was biggest in him: “You go along now an’ ’ave a sensible talk with Maggie. She’s pinin’ to see you, as well I know. An’ get that silly, high-falutin’ rubbige out of your ’ead, ’fore it drives you dotty! You don’t suppose she cares a brass tin-tack for you! Not if you went to ’ell this minnit! You take my tip—”
“Drop it, Tripe!” interrupted big Murphy. “You’re talkin’ out of your neck! I know what I’m doin’; don’t get me shirty! I’m like a blessed filed trigger, so leave me alone!”
Tripe looked a moment at his friend; then had the wisdom to go on without another word. Further up the path he met Maggie, looking very bonnie.
“‘Ee’s down there, Maggie,” he said. “Go an’ ’ave a talk to ’im.”
“I dassent!” said Maggie.
Yet for all that, she went; but when she got near enough to hear him singing, and to hear the steady tramp, tramp of his feet to and fro along the path ahead of her, she truly “dassent.” Instead, she cried a bit, and turned back to the station.
VI
Lady Mary told herself that she must put a stop to the practising for the concert. But when the usual time came, and Jell Murphy presented himself, he found her seated ready at the piano.
Murphy sang his song with a quality of voice and passion that brought strange tears into the woman’s eyes. She felt herself to be intensely moved; the man’s love was so real, and there was so much force of manhood at the back of all. And, also, he really did look splendid. Perhaps you follow her feelings.
Outside, behind one of the pillars of the verandah, Maggie, the maid, stood and cried as if her heart would break. The love in the man’s voice was so plain, and none of it was for her. Presently she could bear it no longer, and went away to the back of the bungalow, to her own quarters.
It was at the end of the practising that big Murphy did suddenly the thing that he had never dared even to think upon. He was singing the last line of the song, and looking down from his great height at the golden bronze of Lady Mary’s hair, when suddenly she looked up at him, her eyes wet and full of a thousand vague feelings and temporary abandon. The next moment big Murphy had her crushed in his arms, and was kissing her, at first madly, and then with an infinite tenderness that the woman appreciated with gentle thrills in every fibre.
Abruptly, a memory of Tom Harrison came into her mind, and she pushed Murphy away from her; for he loosed her the moment he saw her wish to be freed. Then, with a curious sound that was half a sob and half a gasp, she ran out of the room.
Big Jell Murphy stood, maybe, a couple of full minutes, with everything grey about him. Once or twice he swayed a little on his feet; then, realising that she was not coming back to him, he made rather blindly for the entrance, and away out on to one of the mountain paths, to be alone.
It was morning when he staggered back into the station, and it would have been the cells and shot-drill for him, only that his night’s exposure and the strain of his emotions had brought on a severe attack of his old plain fever, so that, instead of the cells, he was taken at once to hospital.
VII
“The ’Scurries is out on the bloomin’ rampage, an’ we’re a-going to give ’em their medicing!” said Tripe, who had been on guard, swinging his rifle down into the rack. “An’ poor old Jell’s out of it all in ’ospital!”
“Wotcher mean?” “Who said so?” “Rot!” “ ’Urray!” came a storm of cries from men in the barracks, as they rushed round little Tripe Jones.
“ ’Ands off!” shouted Tripe, at the top of his voice. “Keep yer ’ands off, or I’ll not tell yer nothink! I ’eard the colonel read the telegraft himself
to the orficers. I stopped near the windy a minute, an’ I ’eard it all.” (Tripe was shameless!) “The hill devils is playin’ blessed murder out beyond the Candy-peel, an’ that’s twenty miles leggin’ for some of you great tallow-fat lads! You’ll sweat! I reck’n it’ll mean the ’ole bloomin’ regiment. There—I told yer so! There goes the alarm”— as the clear, sweet notes of a bugle sounded through the station.
Two hours later the regiment had gone, leaving Captain Harrison with a hundred and twenty men, a sergeant, and two corporals in charge of the station and hospital. The duty to stay had fallen to Tom Harrison, owing to his being on the disabled list with a badly wrenched shoulder. He cursed his luck, but was consoled by the fact of Lady Mary’s company.
Possibly Tom Harrison was a little too much taken up with the Lady Mary to attend properly to his duties, and maybe his temporary slackness had its effect upon the discontented sentries who were so hopelessly “out of the fun” there would be presently for the others beyond the “Candy peel,” as the regiment called the hump of foothills away to the north-west of the station. Whether Captain Tom Harrison was to blame does not matter now, for he wiped everything clean when the thing occurred. But about two o’clock, six hours after the regiment had marched out, just when everything was at its slackest, there came a harsh ripple of rifle-fire from the edge of the ravine which began about a hundred yards from the front of the station.
Three of the sentries went down, and then, before anyone had any conception of what it all meant, there came swarming up out of the ravine itself hundreds upon hundreds of big hillmen.
The station itself was rushed, and half the company cut to pieces, before Captain Harrison was out of the colonel’s bungalow. He jumped the verandah steps, firing his Colt as he jumped; and as he did so, there came the sharp ringing thud of a rifle volley from the windows of the barracks, where the sergeant had already rallied a score of the remaining men.
Six times the sergeant directed his fire into the horde of murdering hillmen, and then came the crack of a single rifle from the hospital. This was followed by the report of three other weapons; for Jell Murphy had got out of bed, in an old, ragged, hospital gown, and was firing from the window of the hospital, with the dispenser and two sick-duty men at his side, each with his rifle. But how they had got the rifles, in the circumstances, is a mystery.
It was this prompt action on the part of the sergeant and Jell that gave Tom Harrison his chance. He looked round quickly, and saw a number of his men, perhaps a round score, penned into the alleyway between the end of the barracks and the cookhouse. They appeared to be fighting with any odd weapon that they had managed to grasp; for one man was certainly swinging a pick, and he saw a heavy iron saucepan being used, evidently in deadly fashion; whilst another man fought with one of the cook’s cleavers.
Captain Tom Harrison did a thing then that the regiment never forgot. He charged straight into the thinnest portion of the surge of hillmen, firing as he charged; and they gave way. He came through, fifty seconds later, stabbed in half a dozen places, whirling a native chopping-knife in his usable hand, and the knife running blood to the hilt. His revolver had gone, so had almost every rag of clothing from his body. He dashed in under the rifles of the sergeant’s party, and mercifully was not shot to pieces. Then down the whole length of the barracks, to where the heavy end door opened opposite to the cookhouse; for it was through this door that the meals were brought in. As the captain had surmised, the door had been made fast on the inside, and the men outside were just penned up for slaughter in the most hopeless sort of cul-de-sac. As he raced for this door, there was a constant thudding against it with some heavy implement that sounded plain through the hideous native yelling and the shouting of his own men.
Captain Tom Harrison reached the door, gave a quick wrench, and had the great bar back. The door came open with a crash, and his men fell in over each other, dragging the dead and the wounded with them. The last man in was knifed clean through and through from behind by a huge pursuing native; but Captain Tom, naked and murderous, hauled the native in after his victim, and butchered him on the floor of the barracks; whilst the men closed the door, and ran for their rifles.
“The colonel’s bungalow!” shouted the captain, staggering up from the dead native. “Lady Mary—the women!” He headed out, naked, through the sergeant’s doorway, followed by a dozen of the men, with fixed bayonets. They made one clear charge right up to the bungalow, and found Jell Murphy there, guarding the women with a big sapper’s axe, but no rifle. They took up their post on the verandah, where, between the cross-fire from the barracks and their own, they drove every native out of the station front within ten minutes.
“Thank God!” muttered Tom Harrison, a little weakly, for he had bled a lot. A moment later: “Lord! I must get some more clothes on—” He never finished even the thought, for he heard the sergeant shouting:
“There’s about a thousand of ’em coming now, sir! Bring the wimmin over, sir. They’re almost ’ere, sir! Quick, sir!”
Captain Tom Harrison turned and raced into the bungalow; but the big sapper had been even quicker to grasp the sergeant’s warning; for the captain met him coming out, with Lady Mary held like a child in his arms; so that it was her sister, the colonel’s wife, that Tom Harrison carried, whilst one of his men would have done likewise with Maggie, the cook, only she told him she wanted no “mauling,” and could manage on her “own two legs” as well as he.
They reached the barracks safely, and as they did so there came a tremendous yelling without, and the square in front of the barracks became literally alive with hillmen, charging in huge, unwieldy mobs of them, and every second or third man of them seemed to be carrying a new Service rifle.
“By gad!” gasped the breathless captain, staring down from one of the barred windows of the barracks. “We’re done, sure. They’ve got Service rifles.”
“I’ve got it, sir!” almost shouted the sergeant. “I couldn’t make head or tail of what all them bloomin’ p’tarns was foolin’ round ’ere for. Them’s new smuggled-in German or Roosian rifles, same bore as the Service pattern—rotten made they is, too, sir. But the amminition’s gone astray somewhere or t’other; an’ that bloomin’ well explains them monkeyin’ in ’ere, like I never ’eard the likes of, not since the bad year. It ain’t their way. But they couldn’t stand ’aving them rifles and no bloomin’ amminition; an’ it’s all a plant to get the station amminition, so as they can play ’ell with them new playthings they got. I’ll bet there’s a lot of devilment to the back of this; an’ I’ll bet there ain’t no ructions out beyond the Candy-peel. It was just a trick to leave the station empty; an’ someone’s going to be hung for this, sir. Look out! Here they come!”
But the soldiers drove the hillmen back time after time during the next ten minutes; for their empty rifles were little better than so many clubs, whilst the remnants of the company shot swiftly and with comparative security from the shelter of the great barracks. At the end of some fifteen or sixteen minutes’ lighting, the enemy had ceased to charge up to the windows, and a sudden rush was made to the left.
“They’re on to the amminition-house, air!” shouted the sergeant; and clapped his rifle again to his shoulder. “Clear them from the door, boys!” he sung out. “If they once get in, we’re done. Fire low, and keep cool—”
“I’m out of cartridges, sergeant,” interrupted a man’s voice.
“Get one of the other chaps’ belts,” snarled the sergeant, without ceasing to cuddle the stock of his rifle to his chin. “There’s enough dead men’s belts to see us through, Gawd knows!”
“We’ve been usin’ them all along, sergeant,” said several voices. “We ain’t any of us got more than a few left.”
The sergeant ceased to cuddle his rifle, and looked round quickly, a sudden touch of added grimness in his eyes.
“Here,” he said, “ keep them devils from the ammunition-door while I take a look!”
He glan
ced at Captain Harrison as he spoke. And the captain, very white, pulled a dead man’s coat round his naked, bloodstained shoulders. He had already appropriated a pair of trousers from the same source, and, as his wounds had ceased to bleed, he managed to keep on the go.
“What are we to do, sir?” asked the sergeant, when they had searched the arm-stands afresh.
“We’ve got to cut through those beggars outside,” said Tom Harrison, “ and get a box of cartridges out of the ammunition-house.”
“It’s the only thing, sir,” said the sergeant, after thinking a moment. “But we won’t never do it. There’s a couple of thousand of them p’tarns outside—an’ there goes our last cartridge!” For as he was speaking the men had ceased firing.
The sortie was arranged. Captain Harrison picked out a dozen of the biggest and soundest men, and allowed Murphy to join them, though the big sapper’s eyes still burned dully with fever. The arrangement was that as soon as the door was opened they should charge through with fixed bayonets, whilst those left at once barred the door and held it for their return
Nothing was said to the three women, who had been put in a sergeant’s cubicle away up at the end of the big room. But Lady Mary must have perceived something of their intention, for suddenly she came running out with an inarticulate cry of supreme distress that made the big sapper take a quick step towards her with his arms open; but the next instant he remembered himself. And then the door was open, and they were making the attempt.
Captain Harrison was clubbed insensible on the very threshold, and dragged back by his feet into the barracks just before they got the door closed and fastened. And it was big Murphy who led the charge, swinging the great sapper’s axe with its four-foot haft and broad head. The weapon made a circle of steel and blood around him, and a couple of score big natives must have died under its swing before he stood in the little stone porch of the ammunition-house. But he stood there alone. The dozen men who had been at his back had died in a dozen different ways in that brief, mad charge.
The Night Land & Other Romances Page 59