by Grant Allen
CHAPTER XI
THE EPISODE OF THE OFFICER WHO UNDERSTOOD PERFECTLY
After our fortunate escape from the clutches of our too-admiring Tibetan hosts, we wound our way slowly back through the Maharajah’s territory towards Sir Ivor’s headquarters. On the third day out from the lamasery we camped in a romantic Himalayan valley — a narrow, green glen, with a brawling stream running in white cataracts and rapids down its midst. We were able to breathe freely now; we could enjoy the great tapering deodars that rose in ranks on the hillsides, the snow-clad needles of ramping rock that bounded the view to north and south, the feathery bamboo-jungle that fringed and half-obscured the mountain torrent, whose cool music — alas, fallaciously cool — was borne to us through the dense screen of waving foliage. Lady Meadowcroft was so delighted at having got clear away from those murderous and saintly Tibetans that for a while she almost forgot to grumble. She even condescended to admire the deep-cleft ravine in which we bivouacked for the night, and to admit that the orchids which hung from the tall trees were as fine as any at her florist’s in Piccadilly. “Though how they can have got them out here already, in this outlandish place — the most fashionable kinds — when we in England have to grow them with such care in expensive hot-houses,” she said, “really passes my comprehension.”
She seemed to think that orchids originated in Covent Garden.
Early next morning I was engaged with one of my native men in lighting the fire to boil our kettle — for in spite of all misfortunes we still made tea with creditable punctuality — when a tall and good-looking Nepaulese approached us from the hills, with cat-like tread, and stood before me in an attitude of profound supplication. He was a well-dressed young man, like a superior native servant; his face was broad and flat, but kindly and good-humoured. He salaamed many times, but still said nothing.
“Ask him what he wants,” I cried, turning to our fair-weather friend, the cook.
The deferential Nepaulese did not wait to be asked. “Salaam, sahib,” he said, bowing again very low till his forehead almost touched the ground. “You are Eulopean doctor, sahib?”
“I am,” I answered, taken aback at being thus recognised in the forests of Nepaul. “But how in wonder did you come to know it?”
“You camp near here when you pass dis way before, and you doctor little native girl, who got sore eyes. All de country here tell you is very great physician. So I come and to see if you will turn aside to my village to help us.”
“Where did you learn English?” I exclaimed, more and more astonished.
“I is servant one time at British Lesident’s at de Maharajah’s city. Pick up English dere. Also pick up plenty lupee. Velly good business at British Lesident’s. Now gone back home to my own village, letired gentleman.” And he drew himself up with conscious dignity.
I surveyed the retired gentleman from head to foot. He had an air of distinction, which not even his bare toes could altogether mar. He was evidently a person of local importance. “And what did you want me to visit your village for?” I inquired, dubiously.
“White traveller sahib ill dere, sir. Vely ill; got plague. Great first-class sahib, all same like Governor. Ill, fit to die; send me out all times to try find Eulopean doctor.”
“Plague?” I repeated, startled. He nodded.
“Yes, plague; all same like dem hab him so bad down Bombay way.”
“Do you know his name?” I asked; for though one does not like to desert a fellow-creature in distress, I did not care to turn aside from my road on such an errand, with Hilda and Lady Meadowcroft, unless for some amply sufficient reason.
The retired gentleman shook his head in the most emphatic fashion. “How me know?” he answered, opening the palms of his hands as if to show he had nothing concealed in them. “Forget Eulopean name all times so easily. And traveller sahib name very hard to lemember. Not got English name. Him Eulopean foleigner.”
“A European foreigner!” I repeated. “And you say he is seriously ill? Plague is no trifle. Well, wait a minute; I’ll see what the ladies say about it. How far off is your village?”
He pointed with his hand, somewhat vaguely, to the hillside. “Two hours’ walk,” he answered, with the mountaineer’s habit of reckoning distance by time, which extends, under the like circumstances, the whole world over.
I went back to the tents, and consulted Hilda and Lady Meadowcroft. Our spoilt child pouted, and was utterly averse to any detour of any sort. “Let’s get back straight to Ivor,” she said, petulantly. “I’ve had enough of camping out. It’s all very well in its way for a week but when they begin to talk about cutting your throat and all that, it ceases to be a joke and becomes a wee bit uncomfortable. I want my feather bed. I object to their villages.”
“But consider, dear,” Hilda said, gently. “This traveller is ill, all alone in a strange land. How can Hubert desert him? It is a doctor’s duty to do what he can to alleviate pain and to cure the sick. What would we have thought ourselves, when we were at the lamasery, if a body of European travellers had known we were there, imprisoned and in danger of our lives, and had passed by on the other side without attempting to rescue us?”
Lady Meadowcroft knit her forehead. “That was us,” she said, with an impatient nod, after a pause— “and this is another person. You can’t turn aside for everybody who’s ill in all Nepaul. And plague, too! — so horrid! Besides, how do we know this isn’t another plan of these hateful people to lead us into danger?”
“Lady Meadowcroft is quite right,” I said, hastily. “I never thought about that. There may be no plague, no patient at all. I will go up with this man alone, Hilda, and find out the truth. It will only take me five hours at most. By noon I shall be back with you.”
“What? And leave us here unprotected among the wild beasts and the savages?” Lady Meadowcroft cried, horrified. “In the midst of the forest! Dr. Cumberledge, how can you?”
“You are NOT unprotected,” I answered, soothing her. “You have Hilda with you. She is worth ten men. And besides, our Nepaulese are fairly trustworthy.”
Hilda bore me out in my resolve. She was too much of a nurse, and had imbibed too much of the true medical sentiment, to let me desert a man in peril of his life in a tropical jungle. So, in spite of Lady Meadowcroft, I was soon winding my way up a steep mountain track, overgrown with creeping Indian weeds, on my road to the still problematical village graced by the residence of the retired gentleman.
After two hours’ hard climbing we reached it at last. The retired gentleman led the way to a house in a street of the little wooden hamlet. The door was low; I had to stoop to enter it. I saw in a moment this was indeed no trick. On a native bed, in a corner of the one room, a man lay desperately ill; a European, with white hair and with a skin well bronzed by exposure to the tropics. Ominous dark spots beneath the epidermis showed the nature of the disease. He tossed restlessly as he lay, but did not raise his fevered head or look at my conductor. “Well, any news of Ram Das?” he asked at last, in a parched and feeble voice. Parched and feeble as it was, I recognised it instantly. The man on the bed was Sebastian — no other!
“No news of Lam Das,” the retired gentleman replied, with an unexpected display of womanly tenderness. “Lam Das clean gone; not come any more. But I bling you back Eulopean doctor, sahib.”
Sebastian did not look up from his bed even then. I could see he was more anxious about a message from his scout than about his own condition. “The rascal!” he moaned, with his eyes closed tight. “The rascal! he has betrayed me.” And he tossed uneasily.
I looked at him and said nothing. Then I seated myself on a low stool by the bedside and took his hand in mine to feel his pulse. The wrist was thin and wasted. The face, too, I noticed, had fallen away greatly. It was clear that the malignant fever which accompanies the disease had wreaked its worst on him. So weak and ill was he, indeed, that he let me hold his hand, with my fingers on his pulse, for half a minute or more without ever opening his
eyes or displaying the slightest curiosity at my presence. One might have thought that European doctors abounded in Nepaul, and that I had been attending him for a week, with “the mixture as before” at every visit.
“Your pulse is weak and very rapid,” I said slowly, in a professional tone. “You seem to me to have fallen into a perilous condition.”
At the sound of my voice, he gave a sudden start. Yet even so, for a second, he did not open his eyes. The revelation of my presence seemed to come upon him as in a dream. “Like Cumberledge’s,” he muttered to himself, gasping. “Exactly like Cumberledge’s.... But Cumberledge is dead... I must be delirious.... If I didn’t KNOW to the contrary, I could have sworn it was Cumberledge’s!”
I spoke again, bending over him. “How long have the glandular swellings been present, Professor?” I asked, with quiet deliberativeness.
This time he opened his eyes sharply, and looked up in my face. He swallowed a great gulp of surprise. His breath came and went. He raised himself on his elbows and stared at me with a fixed stare. “Cumberledge!” he cried; “Cumberledge! Come back to life, then! They told me you were dead! And here you are, Cumberledge!”
“WHO told you I was dead?” I asked, sternly.
He stared at me, still in a dazed way. He was more than half comatose. “Your guide, Ram Das,” he answered at last, half incoherently. “He came back by himself. Came back without you. He swore to me he had seen all your throats cut in Tibet. He alone had escaped. The Buddhists had massacred you.”
“He told you a lie,” I said, shortly.
“I thought so. I thought so. And I sent him back for confirmatory evidence. But the rogue has never brought it.” He let his head drop on his rude pillow heavily. “Never, never brought it!”
I gazed at him, full of horror. The man was too ill to hear me, too ill to reason, too ill to recognise the meaning of his own words, almost. Otherwise, perhaps, he would hardly have expressed himself quite so frankly. Though to be sure he had said nothing to criminate himself in any way; his action might have been due to anxiety for our safety.
I fixed my glance on him long and dubiously. What ought I to do next? As for Sebastian, he lay with his eyes closed, half oblivious of my presence. The fever had gripped him hard. He shivered, and looked helpless as a child. In such circumstances, the instincts of my profession rose imperative within me. I could not nurse a case properly in this wretched hut. The one thing to be done was to carry the patient down to our camp in the valley. There, at least, we had air and pure running water.
I asked a few questions from the retired gentleman as to the possibility of obtaining sufficient bearers in the village. As I supposed, any number were forthcoming immediately. Your Nepaulese is by nature a beast of burden; he can carry anything up and down the mountains, and spends his life in the act of carrying.
I pulled out my pencil, tore a leaf from my note-book, and scribbled a hasty note to Hilda: “The invalid is — whom do you think? — Sebastian! He is dangerously ill with some malignant fever. I am bringing him down into camp to nurse. Get everything ready for him.” Then I handed it over to a messenger, found for me by the retired gentleman, to carry to Hilda. My host himself I could not spare, as he was my only interpreter.
In a couple of hours we had improvised a rough, woven-grass hammock as an ambulance couch, had engaged our bearers, and had got Sebastian under way for the camp by the river.
When I arrived at our tents, I found Hilda had prepared everything for our patient with her usual cleverness. Not only had she got a bed ready for Sebastian, who was now almost insensible, but she had even cooked some arrowroot from our stores beforehand, so that he might have a little food, with a dash of brandy in it, to recover him after the fatigue of the journey down the mountain. By the time we had laid him out on a mattress in a cool tent, with the fresh air blowing about him, and had made him eat the meal prepared for him, he really began to look comparatively comfortable.
Lady Meadowcroft was now our chief trouble. We did not dare to tell her it was really plague; but she had got near enough back to civilisation to have recovered her faculty for profuse grumbling; and the idea of the delay that Sebastian would cause us drove her wild with annoyance. “Only two days off from Ivor,” she cried, “and that comfortable bungalow! And now to think we must stop here in the woods a week or ten days for this horrid old Professor! Why can’t he get worse at once and die like a gentleman? But, there! with YOU to nurse him, Hilda, he’ll never get worse. He couldn’t die if he tried. He’ll linger on and on for weeks and weeks through a beastly convalescence!”
“Hubert,” Hilda said to me, when we were alone once more; “we mustn’t keep her here. She will be a hindrance, not a help. One way or another we must manage to get rid of her.”
“How can we?” I asked. “We can’t turn her loose upon the mountain roads with a Nepaulese escort. She isn’t fit for it. She would be frantic with terror.”
“I’ve thought of that, and I see only one thing possible. I must go on with her myself as fast as we can push to Sir Ivor’s place, and then return to help you nurse the Professor.”
I saw she was right. It was the sole plan open to us. And I had no fear of letting Hilda go off alone with Lady Meadowcroft and the bearers. She was a host in herself, and could manage a party of native servants at least as well as I could.
So Hilda went, and came back again. Meanwhile, I took charge of the nursing of Sebastian. Fortunately, I had brought with me a good stock of jungle-medicines in my little travelling-case, including plenty of quinine; and under my careful treatment the Professor passed the crisis and began to mend slowly. The first question he asked me when he felt himself able to talk once more was, “Nurse Wade — what has become of her?” — for he had not yet seen her. I feared the shock for him.
“She is here with me,” I answered, in a very measured voice. “She is waiting to be allowed to come and help me in taking care of you.”
He shuddered and turned away. His face buried itself in the pillow. I could see some twinge of remorse had seized upon him. At last he spoke. “Cumberledge,” he said, in a very low and almost frightened tone, “don’t let her come near me! I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it.”
Ill as he was, I did not mean to let him think I was ignorant of his motive. “You can’t bear a woman whose life you have attempted,” I said, in my coldest and most deliberate way, “to have a hand in nursing you! You can’t bear to let her heap coals of fire on your head! In that you are right. But, remember, you have attempted MY life too; you have twice done your best to get me murdered.”
He did not pretend to deny it. He was too weak for subterfuges. He only writhed as he lay. “You are a man,” he said, shortly, “and she is a woman. That is all the difference.” Then he paused for a minute or two. “Don’t let her come near me,” he moaned once more, in a piteous voice. “Don’t let her come near me!”
“I will not,” I answered. “She shall not come near you. I spare you that. But you will have to eat the food she prepares; and you know SHE will not poison you. You will have to be tended by the servants she chooses; and you know THEY will not murder you. She can heap coals of fire on your head without coming into your tent. Consider that you sought to take her life — and she seeks to save yours! She is as anxious to keep you alive as you are anxious to kill her.”
He lay as in a reverie. His long white hair made his clear-cut, thin face look more unearthly than ever, with the hectic flush of fever upon it. At last he turned to me. “We each work for our own ends,” he said, in a weary way. “We pursue our own objects. It suits ME to get rid of HER: it suits HER to keep ME alive. I am no good to her dead; living, she expects to wring a confession out of me. But she shall not have it. Tenacity of purpose is the one thing I admire in life. She has the tenacity of purpose — and so have I. Cumberledge, don’t you see it is a mere duel of endurance between us?”
“And may the just side win,” I answered, solemnly.
; It was several days later before he spoke to me of it again. Hilda had brought some food to the door of the tent and passed it in to me for our patient. “How is he now?” she whispered.
Sebastian overheard her voice, and, cowering within himself, still managed to answer: “Better, getting better. I shall soon be well now. You have carried your point. You have cured your enemy.”
“Thank God for that!” Hilda said, and glided away silently.
Sebastian ate his cup of arrowroot in silence; then he looked at me with wistful, musing eyes. “Cumberledge,” he murmured at last; “after all, I can’t help admiring that woman. She is the only person who has ever checkmated me. She checkmates me every time. Steadfastness is what I love. Her steadfastness of purpose and her determination move me.”
“I wish they would move you to tell the truth,” I answered.
He mused again. “To tell the truth!” he muttered, moving his head up and down. “I have lived for science. Shall I wreck all now? There are truths which it is better to hide than to proclaim. Uncomfortable truths — truths that never should have been — truths which help to make greater truths incredible. But, all the same, I cannot help admiring that woman. She has Yorke-Bannerman’s intellect, with a great deal more than Yorke-Bannerman’s force of will. Such firmness! such energy! such resolute patience! She is a wonderful creature. I can’t help admiring her!”
I said no more to him just then. I thought it better to let nascent remorse and nascent admiration work out their own natural effects unimpeded. For I could see our enemy was beginning to feel some sting of remorse. Some men are below it. Sebastian thought himself above it. I felt sure he was mistaken.
Yet even in the midst of these personal preoccupations, I saw that our great teacher was still, as ever, the pure man of science. He noted every symptom and every change of the disease with professional accuracy. He observed his own case, whenever his mind was clear enough, as impartially as he would have observed any outside patient’s. “This is a rare chance, Cumberledge,” he whispered to me once, in an interval of delirium. “So few Europeans have ever had the complaint, and probably none who were competent to describe the specific subjective and psychological symptoms. The delusions one gets as one sinks into the coma, for example, are of quite a peculiar type — delusions of wealth and of absolute power, most exhilarating and magnificent. I think myself a millionaire or a Prime Minister. Be sure you make a note of that — in case I die. If I recover, of course I can write an exhaustive monograph on the whole history of the disease in the British Medical Journal. But if I die, the task of chronicling these interesting observations will devolve upon you. A most exceptional chance! You are much to be congratulated.”