as rose chantry left the room the light went out of terrington's face, and an irresistible lassitude crept like a gray smoke across it. he had been for three days in the saddle, with but a couple of his own guides, in a country cut by torrents from precipitous stone, among a silent and lurking people who were only waiting the word to murder him, and for the last day and night he had been living on food snatched from a holster as he rode.
there was no one in sar to whom he could delegate the duty; no one acquainted as he with the country and the people; no one who knew so intimately their private avarices and animosities; no one who could utilize their tribal treacheries and pretensions, to extract from them the grain they had a mind to keep. they had known him five years before, while sar was as yet unembroiled of its neighbours, and still admitted british influence and rupees, when his shooting feats had won him the nickname by which everywhere he was known, and the friendship of the men who were waiting now, without breach of friendliness, to put an end to him.
it was on account of this intimate acquaintance that he had been selected to command the escort which accompanied sir colvin aire, whose mission was to settle finally the standing of a resident, and of road repair and protection between sar and the frontier.
such simple questions hung however like dewdrops on the web of a wide and hostile political influence. their disappearance would only be of importance as a signal that the meshes had been cut.
lewis chantry had watched the network spreading during the six months he had served as political officer at sar.
he had smiled at it with a soldier's easy optimism, until he tripped one day upon a strand that was being woven between him and home.
the indian government, palsied by a political change of control, and a demand for immediate cheapness however costly, answered his urgent appeals with vague precepts of compromise and sir colvin aire.
sir colvin was not cheap, but, from possessing no previous acquaintance with the question, and being the most easily available and palpably the wrong person, he had, at any rate, an air of cheapness.
he was a big genial man, with no sense of his own importance, and a fixed belief in bluffness. he had shewn terrington his instructions, some six weeks earlier, on the night his escort joined him, and the two were sitting smoking after dinner outside the tent—the stillness of the evening only broken by the cry of a jackal or the scream of an owl—looking up at the black mountain wall that blotted out the northern stars, over which they were to climb on the morrow to an unknown fate.
"you see, they say i'm to make the fullest use of your knowledge of the country," concluded sir colvin, as terrington replaced the lantern by which he had been reading, and lay back in his chair.
"i see," he replied quietly; "but they were careful to make no use of it themselves."
"you're not in love with the trip?" asked the other.
"oh, yes, sir, i'm charmed with it," said the younger man; "but i'm sorry for the chaps that will have to fetch us back."
"what do you mean?" asked his chief slowly.
terrington stretched out his hand into the soft night air.
"it's summer here, sir," he said with seeming irrelevance, "and summer at simla; summer for three full months. it's summer at sar too; but in four weeks there will be snow on the passes, on the palári and darai; and, in six, whoever goes out of sar that way," and he nodded towards india, "goes because he must."
"you think we may have to winter there?" asked sir colvin.
"i took a liberal view of the time we might spend there, sir, and asked at sampur for five hundred spare rounds a man."
"cartridges!" exclaimed the commissioner.
"yes, sir. colonel davis thought they might come in useful, and let me have what they had. then there was a maxim they were doubtful about——-"
"my good man!" broke in the other; "do you take this for an expeditionary force?"
"no, sir," replied the soldier. "i knew we were an escort, so i packed the maxim on a mule. there's a corner in the old fort at sar, i remembered, that it would look well in: and i thought, if we had to spend the winter there, we might make the place as cosy as we could. i meant to tell you, sir, as i had to requisition some extra transport, and i scheduled the lot as 'gifts for the khan.'"
"well, i must say you're a cool hand!" gasped his chief.
"i thought we'd be sure to let him have them if he came for them," explained terrington simply; "so it read all right. i wasn't quite clear if a maxim could be included under necessary equipment!"
"oh, you weren't, weren't you," exclaimed the other. "and how do you think i'm to explain it?"
"wouldn't it come under my knowledge of the country of which you were to make the fullest use, sir?" was the innocent reply.
sir colvin laughed, and the talk turned on what he held to be the peaceable possibilities of sar. on that subject terrington could hold nothing but his tongue. he was an adept at minding his own business, but he tried on the way up country to illuminate his chief's views of the men with whom he had to deal, by tales of sari humour, which were mostly pointed by the decapitation or disembowelment of the humorist's best friend.
at sar the mission found everything in silver paper. it was met imposingly at the gate of the great evil, ten miles below the city, where the river tears a way through rocks of black basalt, and had eaten there the salted cake of a sacred hospitality.
it was welcomed into sar by the bellowings of an unspeakable music, and for three days the bearers of gifts and good wishes wore a path through the bazar between the residency and the new palace.
chantry reported a pleasing change in the khan's bearing since the mission had been appointed, his affability, attention to protests and anxiety for the comfort of the new comers.
out of this very consideration arose the first note of discord, owing, as chantry put it under his breath, to terrington's "damned pigheadedness."
his own guard of sikhs, dogras and bakót levies had been housed in the old palace, now called the fort, a low mud and stone building, whose brown walls of astounding thickness rose hard upon the green tangle of chenar in which the residency stood. the little force fitted it as scantily as a wizened kernel fits its shell, and, although the river washed the fort's eastern face and secured that from assault, was too scant to hold it. the addition of the odd two hundred of the commissioner's escort made defence quite another matter.
the khan knew that, and with many apologies for the lack of accommodation in the fort, cleared out his own barracks on the other side of the river, and put them with immense affability and the stores they contained at chantry's disposal for the escort's occupation.
chantry, unable ever to credit any one with less than his own share of honour, accepted gratefully on the commissioner's behalf, glad to be relieved from a further cleansing of the fort and from the pressing difficulty of provisions.
he explained the arrangement to sir colvin, as the guides swung out of the brown mob of saris, past the guard of honour into the residency compound, and formed front with their own undauntable swagger before rose chantry's smiling eyes.
aire listened attentively, with his eye on the frail figure in heliotrope on the verandah.
"sounds all that's desirable," he said; "but i'm not the one to settle it. there's your man," he nodded, as terrington rode up to report.
terrington's hard stare swept the city as the proposal was repeated, a grim smile darkening his mouth.
"very considerate of the old gentleman," he said slowly; "but i think we'll stay here."
chantry exploded with difficulties. the fort wasn't habitable; he couldn't face the question of supply; the khan would be insulted; the difficulty of negotiations increased. he turned to sir colvin imploringly, but the commissioner shook his head.
"delegation of authority," he purred. "mine's political!"
"but what am i to tell the khan?" cried chantry in expostulation. "am i to say that you're afraid?"
terrington's stare had included absently the other's face.
"tell the old fox," he said, "that i'm delighted to have a political officer to make my explanations. last time we met i had, as he'll remember, to make them myself."
he asked sir colvin's permission to fall the men out for dinner, and rode back without a further word about the fort. he was unused in the matter of orders either to ask or answer questions.
chantry made a despairing but fruitless appeal to the commissioner, who replied that, having entrusted terrington with absolute discretion in the military affairs of the mission, he could not interfere.
"good man," he concluded; "dam good man! can talk through my pukhtu, and cooks like a chef. you'll get used to him, if you stand in with him. but he'd clear out the devil if he got in his way."
sir colvin had learnt something from the daring fashion in which terrington had held up the various khels, ill-affected most of them, but all blandly amiable, from which the mission had accepted hospitality on the road to sar.
he had fixed each, as he approached it, in a grip of steel; covered its avenues, commanded its towers, as if about to exterminate a nest of hornets; but he had entered with an air of unconcerned good-fellowship, as though the rifles ranged without to avenge him and the naked steel at his elbow had no real existence.
"what's about the risk in these places?" sir colvin had asked on quitting one of the most forbidding.
"never can tell," replied terrington with a shrug. "treachery with these chaps is like a hiccup. it often comes as a surprise, even to the man who has it."
"and don't they rather resent your precautions?"
"oh, not a bit! they admire them. it's part of the style of a gentleman hereabouts to distrust your neighbour so explicitly that he daren't misbehave. prevents costly mistakes. the etiquette is to show him you can murder him, and then to credit him genially with too much sense to put you to the trouble."
the etiquette was complicated, as terrington admitted, by the lasting advantages which infidel slaughter offers to one of the true faith, very tempting to starving and houseless hill-men, with veins fired by a seductive paradise.
but etiquette, though worn once or twice a trifle thin, saw them safe into sar, where sir colvin recognized in terrington's insulting suspicions of his host the policy which had proved so curiously effective throughout their journey.
its observed success made him accept more readily the difficulties entailed, especially since terrington seemed to expect no assistance in removing them.
he set to work upon the fort with the bakót levies on the afternoon of his arrival, and began at the same time to organize a system of supply. he was at his desk, or directing alterations in the fort until a late hour of the evening, eating his dinner with one hand and working with the other, so that he did not meet rose chantry till chota hazri next day.
a wing of the residency had been turned into mess and ante-rooms, and furnished the commissioner with quarters. clones, the doctor, found lodging in another part of it, while terrington, walcot and dore, his immediate subordinates, and langford, who commanded the sikh and dogra detachments, made shift in an adjoining bungalow, and the native officers were sheltered by the fort.
it was still early when terrington, already half through his morning's work, entered the mess-room; but only mrs. chantry remained beside the urn. she wore a brown canvas habit, a hard straw hat, with the colours, scarlet and sage, of her husband's regiment. she looked to him absurdly young and pretty for a woman in such a place; and he was provoked by the folly which permitted her to arrive there. she was trying to look disdainfully indifferent. she was proud of being the one englishwoman in that utmost post of the empire, and this man alone had appeared absolutely unconscious of her presence.
"i suppose you're captain terrington," she said, turning towards him from the table; "as i was introduced yesterday to all the others?"
"yes," he smiled, "i'm nevile terrington: and it needs no supposing to give a name to you."
"really?" she said, reseating herself. "i shouldn't have imagined you were aware of my existence."
"all too well!" he sighed, smiling. "there is nothing i would have sooner missed in sar."
she snapped back the tap of the samovar, and faced him in a pretty little blaze of petulance across the open teapot.
"you would turn me out now if you could, i dare say," she cried.
"this very hour," he assured her, his smile unruffled. "but i can't. 'rien ne va plus,' as they say at another game. do you know what that means?"
"at monte carlo?"
"no! in sar? it means winter, i'm afraid."
"winter!" she exclaimed, her resentment embarrassed by the man's imperturbable temper, and her interest provoked by his voice. "i'm going down with sir colvin."
"yes!" he said. "and when will that be?"
"when he's done here."
"yes!" he said again, "but that hardly puts a date to it. i can give you one for the snow."
"look here!" she cried—and the little imperious words, with their little imperious manner, made suddenly a bond of battle between them—"you haven't been here a day, and you've set every one foaming. do you know that?"
"yes," he said humbly. "i'm afraid i've put my foot into it all round."
"well!" she exclaimed. "do you want me against you too?"
he shook his head gravely.
"heaven forbid!" he said. "but you're against me already."
she rose, lifted her riding-whip from the table and took her skirt in her hand.
"yes, i am!" she said.
she moved towards the verandah, visible through the carved screen of wood that filled a part of the wall: stopping before a quaint cashmiri mirror that hung upon it to set her hat straight and tie her veil.
terrington's eyes followed her as he stirred his tea.
"where do you ride?" he asked, as she went towards the door.
she turned in the entrance, facing him, against the crimson folds of the purdah.
"everywhere," she said.
"you'll have to give it up," he announced tranquilly.
she stood an instant longer, her lithe brown figure framed in the curtains' crimson and gold, to let him realize the defiance under her lowered eyelids and the scorn of her little lifted chin. then she pushed back the purdah and stepped out into the sun.
