Devil's Wind (19 page)

Helen saw everything after this strange fashion. Bala, dark and fierce, upon the temple platform, seemed as near as poor young Lizzie Carthew, with her dead face only a yard away—as near, and as infinitely far.

Something which was neither mist nor smoke was between Helen and all that she looked upon. It was like a sheet of impalpable glass. It was like the veil which hangs between the living and the dead. Through its intangible film she heard the screams that were like one long, unending scream. Through it she looked upon terrible and tragic things.

She saw Mr. Moncrieff, the chaplain, standing with two or three others. He stood deep in the stream, and it eddied about his waist, and he rocked a little as it swayed him. He had a book in his hand. It was a prayer-book, and he turned the pages as if he were in church. When he had found the place that he wanted, he bent his head, and began to read. Helen saw his lips move, and then a mounted sowar came driving through the stream with the water splashing up before him and behind. It made a cloud of spray and foam, and the lifted sabre caught the sunlight very brightly once, and then went down through the cloud into the water, and was dimmed.

There was a woman clinging to the chaplain's arm. Helen heard her scream, and then they were all down, and the water was rolling over them and covering them from sight. The trooper's wild shout rose high above the din as he rode on, and as he rode, he laughed and waved his bare arm, which dripped with blood and water.

There was less shouting now. The nine-pounders were silent, and the musket men had ceased to fire; but the sandy lane and the landing-place seethed with a wild confusion of murderers and the murdered, and the turbid waters were beaten into red waves as the wild troopers rode their horses into the shallows, slashing and shouting and calling to one another.

It must have been at this time that desperate hands succeeded in pushing Major Vibart's boat off the sand-bank into deeper water. With a great jerk it swung round, and that jerk sent Richard Morton slipping back and over the side.

Helen had braced her muscles for the jolt. She held the sheet desperately, but her hands slipped inch by inch as his weight came heavily and yet more heavily upon them. They were strong hands and there was a frantic courage behind them, but they were only a woman's hands, and Richard Morton was a heavy man for all his leanness.

As she knelt there, straining and panting, the boat swung round more and more, and suddenly, as it moved, she caught sight of Adela.

Adela Morton had remained upon her knees, close under the side of the boat. She seemed to have no power to rise or move, and her eyes stared over the water, and saw it beat against her breast and sometimes rise almost to her chin, yet she never raised herself nor stirred. Now as the boat swung away from her and slid out into the channel, she looked around her like a terrified animal.

It was at this moment that Helen saw her and called to her loudly:

“Adie, Adie, come this way!”

But Adela stumbled to her feet, blind and deaf with fear. In the wild panic that knows nothing of direction she struggled forward, her wet clothes dragging at her limbs. She felt the ground rise under her feet and gained the shore. Then she screamed and began to run, and as she ran she heard a man shout and laugh, and saw above her head a red sword raised to strike. Helen saw it too. She had called and called with all her strength. She was powerless; she looked and could not turn her eyes away. She saw the sword rise and begin to fall, and then with her own instinctive shudder, the weight upon her hands slipped lower, and in an instant she forgot Adela and looked to see the water come up against Dick's shoulders, against his chin, against his mouth. His head had fallen back, and the stream seemed to be drawing and pulling it under.

Then Helen cried aloud. They had drifted out into the open channel, a little away from the confusion, and there was something in that cry of hers that rose above the other sounds of misery. She cried again and again, and two men crawled out from under the thatch and stared at her in amazement.

“What are you doing?” said one.

“Help me! Help me to pull him in!” gasped Helen.

The second man drew Lizzie Carthew's body out of the way and looked over the side.

“He's dead!” he exclaimed.

“No, no. Pull him in—for God's sake—for God's sake.”

“We've no room for dead men,” said the first man, not brutally, but as one who states a fact.

Helen turned her white face, with its terrible blazing eyes, upon him. They were like darkness with a flame in it.

“Help me,” she said, and as she spoke she felt the sheet slip a little more. Then she looked back to the river, and saw the awful tinged water flowing like death itself between her and Dick. His face looked through it—his dead face. It sank lower and it was as if the whole world slipped away from her with it, leaving her unimaginably alone in a space where neither God nor man would ever come. Her anguish broke from her in another cry, not loud, but so bitter, so full of misery, that the second man stretched down and caught at the sheet.

“But he's dead,” he said, yet he pulled strongly.

As he pulled Helen saw the veil of the water grow thin and part, giving Dick back to her again, and her soul came back with a rush from that strange lonely place.

The two men pulled Richard Morton in and lifted him on board. He lay there with his head on Helen's lap, and Helen bent above him and tore a strip from the sheet to bind the wound on his head. It was a long, ragged tear, and it crossed the line of an old, deep scar.

“What's the good o' that to a dead man?” grumbled the man who had lifted him over the side; but Helen made no answer. She had felt the little pulse that beats in the temple; she had felt it throb as she touched him on the brow, and every pulse in her own body answered it.

CHAPTER XX

THE STAYING OF THE SWORD

If thou take oath in a matter, and thou presently break thine oath,

Thou shalt pay thy dues to the Brahmin and he shall pronounce thee clean.

But if thou have sworn by the Ganges, then the most high Gods are wroth,

And all the waters of Ganges, they shall not purge thy sin.

Sereek Dhundoo Punth was alone in his tent. The door hangings were drawn aside and the early morning light stole past them. It took a reddish tinge from their rich colour, and struck upwards faintly, losing itself by degrees in the orange-coloured dusk that filled the upper part of the tent.

There was no one before the doorway, which framed a rectangular patch of dusty ground. A man walking to and fro inside the tent would have nothing else before his eyes. Dhundoo Punth had sent his servants away. He wished to be alone and he walked to and fro continually.

When he looked towards the tent door he saw that empty, dusty space with the pale, hot sunshine on it, and when he looked down at his feet he saw the same sunshine lying in a square upon the carpet and striking all the colours of the seven great jewels from its dyes—sapphire, emerald, turquoise, topaz, amethyst, pearl, and ruby.

The colours flashed as he paced to and fro, but the red of the ruby prevailed. It spread and spread until it swallowed all the rest, and the ground tone of the silken carpet swam before his staring eyes, until it seemed as if he walked in a bloody mist that rose about his feet.

Up and down walked Dhundoo Punth, and the muslin of his thin garments was damp with sweat.

He was listening, listening intently, and the strained nerve throbbed to sounds that were only counterfeit and not real at all—the roar of guns, the clamour of many voices and a noise of groaning that burdened the heavy air.

Suddenly the sound of a horse galloping came to him sharp and distinct. This was a real sound, and it relieved the tension. It came on, faster and faster, then stopped, and on the instant a man covered with dust broke in upon the Nana's solitude, a man whose face was so pale that it seemed as if the dark pigment had been driven from it by sheer horror.

It was Francis Manners, called the Rao Sahib. He came in panting, crying out, “My uncle—my uncle!” and the Nana stood aghast with the sweat on his face. What had chanced? What had befallen? Were broken oaths so quickly heard, so quickly punished by the high gods?

“What is it? Speak!” he stammered, and the young man moistened his pale lips and threw out his hands.

“They kill every one. Is this your oath? All the women—all the children—and she is there—Adela. They said she lived. Is this your order? It is not to be borne. Is it your order? Is it your order, my uncle?”

Dhundoo Punth looked at him with his wild, brilliant eyes. They had the same eyes, these two, and in each there was a spark that might blaze some day in madness. The Nana frowned, drawing his brows close.

“It is Bala. It is Tantia,” he exclaimed. “Ai, Bala, my brother, you are not master yet!”

He broke into a fury and cursed, striding up and down, a terrible, unwieldy figure that seemed to fill the tent. His face was convulsed. Fear and rage looked out of his restless eyes. Suddenly he stood still.

“Go back, and take them an order,” he said. “Take them an order from me, from their lord. To-morrow I shall be Peishwa. It is not Bala who shall sit upon the throne. It is not Bala who is lord. The women are to be saved, and the children. They are to be saved and brought to me here—to the Savada house. As for the woman you desire, take her. What is that to me? The men I have given to the army. In a month they could not take them. Then I spoke. Then I made my plan. I gave them these men who are as brave as devils, whom they could not subdue, no, not with all their force. I gave them into their hands. Let them be content. Take my order to them. Show them my ring. Tell them it is their master who speaks. Tell them to obey. If any one will not obey, he shall be blown from a gun. Yes, if it were Tantia himself, or Bala, my brother. These are my words.”

He pulled at his finger and dragged off the ring in which the great ruby shone so red, and the Rao Sahib took it and went out quickly, like a man pursued, and again the sound of galloping hoofs came back to the Nana as he paced back and forth across the sunlit patch upon the ground.

Down at the ghaut the bodies lay piled, one on the other, the dying with the dead. Far down, far down the stream the shuddering villagers turned from the sacred water and said tremblingly:

“We cannot drink of it; we cannot look upon it.”

Here by the landing-stage, the burning thatch smouldered away and the firing and the shouting died.

As the Rao Sahib came down the ravine, riding furiously, the lightest of the boats swung out into the deeper channel. One of those who pushed her off was Captain Moore, and as he pushed he fell, shot through the heart and the waters of the Ganges closed over him. At the same moment the Rao Sahib saw a woman who had been crouching in the water spring up and falter blindly towards the shore. She had a grey felt hat upon her head, but as she ran it fell off and he saw her hair—her floating chestnut hair. The sun shone on it and on her face distorted with terror. She came stumbling to the shore with the water splashing about her, dragging her back, and as she gained the sand a sowar rode pelting up behind with his sword raised and a shout of “Maro—maro—kill—kill—kill.”

The Rao Sahib spurred forward. He too shouted, and as he reached the water's edge and reined in his horse the woman flung herself against the animal's shoulder and gripped the saddle-cloth, pressing blindly against the warm heaving life, as if it could screen her from the sword which she had seen raised up and ready to strike.

In every quivering limb she felt the thrust of it already, along each shrinking nerve there ran the anticipated anguish. But the trooper rode past with a shout,

“Victory to the Maharaja!” he cried and galloped on, raising his dripping sword in a salute as he passed his master's nephew. The Rao Sahib looked down and the woman looked up. On the hot air between them memory flung its strange mirage. Both saw the green of springing plants and the cool gleam of a sleeping pool. A woman stood by the pool and smiled. There were crimson flowers at her white bosom and in her white dress. There was a man who caught her dress and groaned.

The air trembled and gave up its vision. The past was gone and the dead years were dead.

Here was a woman with lips that had forgotten how to smile. Her dress was white no more, and the red that stained it was not the red of flowers.

Her hands caught at the man's garments. Her eyes held the extremity of terror as she raised them.

Francis Manners and Adela Morton recognised each other.

CHAPTER XXI

THROUGH THE WIND

Death has brought me alone, to a dim and terrible place.

I have forgotten Sun and Star.

I cannot see.

The darkness is all around me, the darkness covers my face.

This is no land where the living are. Let me go free.

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 terror 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.