Devil's Wind (21 page)

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 with 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.”

“It is a good thing that one doesn't acquire new relations at my age, or I should have got detached from mine, with a vengeance,” said Richard.

He threw a little stone into the pool, and

watched the ripples spread like rings of crystal

on its smooth brown surface.

Helen watched them too. They opened, widened, touched the edges of the pool, and came back in tiny waves.

She had not meant to speak, but she did speak.

“Men of jour age do form new relationships sometimes,” she said.

As soon as the words had passed her lips, her whole body tingled. She knew that he had turned and was looking at her, but she could not meet his look.

“You mean they marry? Or get engaged?”

He spoke very slowly and thoughtfully.

“Yes,” said Helen, her conscience urging her.

“One would hardly forget a thing like that,” said Richard. He stared at her left hand, as he had stared at it once or twice before.

“No,” he said again, “one would hardly forget that.”

Suddenly his glance leapt to her face.

“Helen, was I engaged to be married?”

Helen felt the blood leave her heart. It beat noisily against her temples and against the drums of her ears. Through the noise she heard Dick's voice repeating his question, and she heard her own voice answer: “No; oh, no!”

And then there was silence and a mist all about her. Presently it cleared, and she saw the green shadows and brown depths of the pool below her. There was a quick play of light and shade upon its surface, a mingling of many reflections which yielded to one another by beautiful gradations of colour. A brilliant butterfly danced by, beating the hot, moist air with exquisite iridescent flutterings.

Below, in the water, its faint, lovely shadow danced too. It flickered from sun to shade and from shade to sun again. Then it was gone.

Richard Morton's chin was in his hand and his lips smiled. He still wore the native dress with which he had come into the entrenchment, and Helen had torn her sheet in two to provide him with a turban for his head. He had grown a short, black beard that was curly, though his hair was not, and his face was burned so brown that he might very well have passed for a native, until he looked up, and you saw how blue his eyes were.

He had been doing some hard thinking in the past days. He still remembered nothing, but the situation had begun to have a charm for him. Behind the dark curtain which had dropped across his life, he suspected—Helen.

She watched him, but had not guessed that he was watching her. He had not forgotten the look on her face when she found him waking in the temple. That look and his name upon her lips. A girl like Helen Wilmot did not call a man by the name which his intimate friends used, unless he were more to her than a friend. From the first he had suspected, but now he began to feel sure, quite sure. It was not for nothing that their natures fitted at every point. Richard was at that stage in which a man feels that he has always known, and always loved, the one woman in the world. From the first she had been friend and comrade. Closer friend, dearer comrade than any that he could recall. After three days he found it impossible to believe that he had known her for three years, and had not loved her. He could not guess that the Helen she showed him here in this solitude was not the Helen whom he and the world had known. No, he could not believe that this love was a new thing. Her presence was too dearly familiar. They had been lovers in the years he had forgotten, and death had spared them that they might be lovers again through all the years which he and she would remember together. He grudged those past, forgotten years, and yet as he peered back into them, he thought he could recall the love that had filled them. As every lover believes that there was no time before his love began, so his love reached backwards now and filled the empty past.

Past, present, and future caught and held the glow. Life was very pleasant to Richard Morton as he lay by the sun-flecked pool and looked at Helen Wilmot.

The coarse native sheet wrapped her closely. Even the half of it was sufficiently wide to reach from breast to knee, confining the torn, limp folds of her grey dress. Her arms were bare, and her hair fell in a thick plait to her waist. Over the brow it lay in deep waves. Mrs. Middleton would have called it very untidy. Richard thought it made her look very young. Then she moved a little, and he saw the colour stir under that white skin of hers which never burned at all.

“Helen,” he said, in a new voice, and she turned startled tragic eyes on him. Their looks met, his ardent, hers imploring. She got up with a quick nervous movement.

“Oh, it is going to rain again!” she exclaimed. “Dick, we must go back. We really can't afford to get wet, with no clothes to change, and it would mean fever, to a certainty.”

Richard got up too. He laughed a little, and did not speak. His look of tender amusement followed her as she ran before him to the cave. That night Helen could not sleep. Her conscience was awake, and it stabbed deep. When she was sure that Richard slept she got up and knelt at the narrow mouth of the cave.

A jutting boulder sheltered the opening from above. The rain came down in a steady sheet, and there was not a breath of wind. Helen tried to pray, but her prayers seemed shut into the low cave. The rain hung like a curtain at its door, and her prayers were shut in with her—with her and Dick.

She stopped praying.

It was very dark—very, very dark. Somewhere behind all that blackness there was the soul that had been Adela. Helen's eyes strained against the gloom. Her spirit strained too. Her lips moved.

“Adie,” she said, on a low gasping breath. “Oh, Adie, are you there? Can you hear? Can you understand? You didn't love him. You didn't make him happy. I love him so much. Oh, Adie, poor Adie, do you know?”

The tears sprang hot from her eyes and ran down to her moving lips. The rain never ceased and they kept on falling, those salt, hot tears. Suddenly they came with a rush:

“I ought to have told him—I ought to tell him now. Oh, I ought—I ought—I ought—”

She said the words over and over until they lost all meaning, and all the time she knew that she dared not tell him now. The courage was all gone out of her.