BOOK III CHAPTER I

Bethune had soon packed his simple baggage; then he went straight to bed, setting his will upon sleep, against thought.

But what mind perturbed can command repose? Every ugly demon of disquiet that his situation could breed took form and sat beside him on the narrow bed. Three there were of a special torment. One with the eyes of hatred that Lady Gerardine had fixed upon him that evening. A twin demon that for ever repeated in his ear: "You should have died, that he might live." And a third, whose face was veiled, whose immutable hand pointed towards the empty sandy desert of the future.

When at last, far on in the watches of the night, sleep did fall upon him, it was in trouble and confusion of mind—a dream-struggle with fate, more painful even than the reality.

He was back in the midst of the siege—one of the starving, thirst-plagued, harassed garrison. They were hard pressed, piling sandbags on a newly defiladed rampart, but his men were a leaden weight upon him. He could not stir them to activity; when he tried to shout orders or expostulation, he could bring forth nothing but a whisper. Always the barricades melted away beneath his touch, his very rifle twisted like wax when he handled it, and then there sprang into the breach Muhammed Saif-u-din, one of an endless chain of leaping swordsmen: and Muhammed stood with folded arms smiling at him ironically.

Once again the siege. They were going to bury Vane. A file of little Goorkhas were picking the grave, and he was working at it too with the shot whistling overhead. Never was grave so hard to dig. They toiled, it seemed to him, for years, and still the stones rolled back into the hole and all was to begin again. Then suddenly it was ready: they were lowering the stiff figure, rolled in a cerement of tent canvas, into the shallow ditch. And a flap of the cloth fell back from over the face of the dead. It was not the face of Vane, but the face of Harry English. Then, with the awful knowledge of the dreamer, Bethune knew that Harry was not dead. But when he tried to call out to the others to stop, again he had no voice. He saw a little brown Goorkha twist the cloth over the livid countenance. They began shovelling the stony earth upon his friend; and while he felt in his own lungs the suffocation of him that is buried alive, a voice said in his ear: "What is it to you? You, who should have died that he might live!"

The suffocation continued so intense as to drown in physical torture even the workings of the over-active brain. Then, out of the blank, dream-consciousness struggled back to him. And again it was the siege. He was on his hard and narrow couch; it was the middle of the night, there was a great anxious rumour about him; sentries were calling; the enemy were upon them. In spite of anguished struggle, Bethune remained bound, hand and foot, while never had his spirit been more vividly awake. He could hear the running footsteps of the men in the passages, the thud, thud of the soft-shod Easterns. He could hear some one break into his room, hear himself called: "Raymond, Raymond!" And with the curious double personality of the sleeper, he told himself that it was years since any one had called him by that name—long and forlorn years of solitary life.

"Raymond!" called the voice, and the red light as of a torch burned through his closed eyelids. "Wake, Raymond!"

He knew who it was. It was Harry; his comrade who wanted him in the danger. What shame to be sleeping at such a moment!

Bethune wrenched himself from his pillow and sat upright. The room was full of light to his dazzled eyes; and the voice, the voice of Harry English, was still ringing in his ears.

Muhammed Saif-u-din, who had been bending over the bed, one hand on the sleeper's shoulder, withdrew his touch and straightened himself. In his left hand he held a candle. The light flickered upon his dense black beard. But he was turbanless, and the tossed crisp hair was boyishly loose over his brow. His eyes were fixed upon Bethune, and Bethune stared back. Then Muhammed spoke:

"Raymond," he said.

For a moment that was heavier in the scales of time than most hours of men's lives, the two plunged their gaze into each other.

"My God," said Bethune, in a whisper then, "you!"

A dream! Another dream of torture! Nay, no dream this time; he was awake. The unbelievable had happened. The grave had yawned and given out a living man. Harry English was alive. He had come back from the bourne whence no traveller returns, to claim his own—to claim his wife. As in a sudden vision, more vivid than any of his troubled fancies had been to-night, Bethune saw them in each other's arms, and was himself stabbed through and through by daggers of fire—he, the man whose misery it was to love his friend's wife! ...

The dead had heard her call. He could see it all now, with horrible lucidity. All was clear to him. He himself had brought Lady Gerardine, the forgetful, back to the memory of her love. She had called, and Harry had come—from death.

And here he stood, Harry English, looking into his friend's eyes, reading his friend's soul. Suddenly Bethune grew cold to the marrow.

He would have given everything he had, his life by inches, to be able at that instant to veil those tell-tale eyes of his. But in vain; he could not drop the lids between them. At last, with a short laugh, Harry English turned away and released him, and Bethune covered his face with his hands.

Oh life, more cruel than death! These two had been closer than brothers; it was eternity itself that was giving them back to each other. And thus did they meet!

"Bethune," said he that had been the Pathan, in brief decided accents which once again whirled Raymond back to the hours when all had hung upon their leader in the crucial emergency, "there is no time for explanation. Every moment just now is precious. I must have this beard off—I want scissors, razors." As he spoke he tore his long coat from his back; he caught up the razors on the dressing-table with impatient hands. "Scissors, man, scissors! And for the Lord's sake, give me some more light!"

Bethune sprang out of bed as if he had indeed gone back to that past of which he had been dreaming and his commanding officer had called upon his services.

No stranger scene had ever been enacted within the narrow limits of this antique room, nor one more fraught with vital significance: though here, perchance, life had been born, and from here, surely, life had departed.

A silence as heavy as the last doom lay between the comrades; and every second as it passed was ticked off, it seemed, by Bethune's heart. Death they had faced together often—it was at the test of life that friendship had faltered.

Swiftly the glossy wings of the Pathan's beard fell under the snipping blades. And when he had exhausted what aid he could render, Bethune sat on the edge of the bed and watched the passing of Saif-u-din and the rising of Harry English from the dead.

There was one moment of outward triviality which yet, to the looker-on, was charged with a pain almost beyond bearing; it was when English, with the lather white upon his chin and cheek, turned quickly round upon him with hands outstretched for a towel. How often had not he seen his comrade thus, in the old days, when they had lived together, marched together, laughed and fought and suffered together, and he had been so happy!

The shaving accomplished, Captain English bent forward to the mirror and occupied himself with minute care in trimming and combing the flaunting, upturned moustache of the Pathan back to the old sober limits. There was not a quiver in the strong busy hands.

Vaguely Bethune, in the chaos of his thoughts, wondered how he could ever have believed this man dead. Such as he did not die, so long as they were wanted in life.

Then it was Harry English, indeed, that looked round. If Bethune's brain had had room for any doubt, the doubt must have died at that instant. Harry English, pallid, where for years the Eastern beard had grown so close—almost as with the pallor of the cheek upon which the earth has lain—worn, not so much by these same years as by a devouring impatience sternly held: but the old leader nevertheless, with such a light in his dark eyes as had been wont to kindle there when he called his men into the heart of the fight.

He spoke suddenly, abruptly; and the other found once more the exorbitant situation heightened rather than lowered by the very triviality of the words that marked it:

"I suppose," he said, "that you can lend me a coat. Where is it? In your bag?"

He could not wait for his companion to draw his wits together. In a couple of movements the whole contents of the portmanteau were on the floor, and his arm was already in the sleeve of a shooting-jacket.

This urgency of haste, under strong control though it was, awoke an answering fever in Bethune's veins. Oh, there was no need of words to make him understand! When he thought of her to whom the husband was hastening, his own heart beat to madness.

In two steps Harry was at the door, when Bethune, with an inarticulate sound, flung himself before him, stretching out his arms. So poignantly familiar did the old comrade look in the shabby shooting-jacket that his heart was all dissolved within him for ruth and tenderness.

A second English fixed his friend with cold and steel-bright glance, inquiring: then his face relaxed.

"Not now, Raymond," said he, put him on one side with quick but kindly touch, and was gone.